


The Girl Who Read the Stars

by earlgreytea68



Category: Original Work, the girl who never was
Genre: F/M, Otherworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 16:12:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2474363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merrow knows it's going to be a good year. Jupiter's moving into her constellation, and there's a cute new boy sitting in front of her in homeroom. Now if she could just stop behaving like an idiot around him, she might even stand a chance. Except for the fact that her tarot-card reading mother is convinced the new boy is bad news. And even Merrow herself is starting to think he could be written in the stars...and that's not a good thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> THE GIRL WHO READ THE STARS is an Otherworld novella, set between my original novels THE GIRL WHO NEVER WAS and THE BOY WITH THE HIDDEN NAME. But it's completely standalone. 
> 
> Thanks to all the usuals who helped out with this one!

I know it is going to be a good school year because Jupiter is moving into my constellation.

Okay, I know you’re thinking that this sounds stupid, but why is it any stupider than things like four-leaf clovers and lucky pens or “breakfast every day makes you better at tests”? Maybe there’s some scientific truth to that last one, but I think mostly the truth is that you believe it. Really, you’re good at tests if you’re good at tests, or a certain kind of test, and I hate people thinking that just having a bowl of cereal is suddenly going to make you awesome at multiple-choice questions. Multiple-choice questions are the worst. As if the world is ever that black and white.

Mom says it’s fine that I’m not good at multiple-choice tests. And Mother says she’s okay with it too, but she wants to make sure I’m trying. Mother’s a lawyer, which means she had to pass a bar exam, so she is really good at multiple- choice tests. It’s a good thing we have Mom to balance things out. Mom teaches yoga and does astrology readings. She’s the one who taught me how to read the stars, and how to pay attention to the cycles of the moon and the path of the sun.

And she’s why I know it is going to be a good school year because Jupiter is moving into my constellation.

I tell her that as she’s driving me to school, which she’s doing only because it’s the first day. We are doing three-part yoga breaths as we drive, because Mom thinks that you shouldn’t start the day with stale oxygen in your lungs.

“And positive thinking, Merrow,” she is saying as I exhale all the air out of my lungs and contract my rib cage. “That’s always the key, right?”

“Jupiter’s in my constellation this year,” I remind her. “Good things,” she agrees. “Expansion. Scope. Open horizons.”

“It’s going to be a good year,” I decide.

“And that’s the first key to it being a good year!” she crows. “Namaste, kiddo,” she says, and she leans over and kisses my head. “Mother’ll be here to get you at the end of the day.”

“If she’s too busy, I can take the bus,” I say, gathering up my bag.

“Not on your first day!” She sounds horrified that I would ever have suggested that.

I shake my head fondly and get out of the car and take a second to look up toward the high school. It’s old and kind of shabby-looking, although the graffiti has been freshly eliminated from the bricks in honor of the brand-new school year. When it was built, I’m sure it was super grand, with its Ionic columns and all that, and that’s probably why it’s still standing, because, as Mother says, stuff was built to last back then. 

Providence is the kind of city that’s got a ton of private schools that you could go to, but Mother and Mom decided to keep me in public school. The public school isn’t the best in the world, but it’s not the worst, and I’m used to everyone. I wouldn’t say I’m one of those people with tons of friends, but I’m also not one of those people who hates everyone. Mom says it’s a combination of my sun sign (Cancer) and the planets in my twelfth house. I’m just a loner, she says. She always says it proudly because loners, she says, learn to be independent, and independence is always good.

Anyway, I don’t feel any great dread over the start of another school year, and in fact, I feel more excitement than I have in the past, because this year Jupiter is in my constellation, and I think it’s going to be a great year. 

***

They do homeroom at my school alphabetically, which means it’s boring and predictable and there’s never any chance of a shake-up—of you getting to sit next to someone different from the person you’ve been sitting next to for the past twelve years of your life, since kindergarten. My last name is Rodriguez-Chance, because my mothers didn’t believe in only one of their names carrying on. The school has always treated it as an R name. One year I tried to convince them that Rodriguez was my middle name and I should be in the A-through-F homeroom, just so that I could start my day off with a different group of people. I almost succeeded too. Because they were both my last name, my mothers supported the idea that I should get to be a Chance one year, to make up for all the Rodriguezes I’d already gotten to be, but the school didn’t see it that way.

So I sit in the M-through-R homeroom, and in front of me is Diana Ramsey, and behind me is nobody. Do you have any idea how boring it is to always be the last of the line? Because it is super boring. And Diana’s a nice enough girl, but she is super serious about everything. She wants to be a doctor, which is awesome, of course, but I am totally bewildered by anyone who is just starting junior year of high school and has any idea about the future. Because I have no idea. I know that Jupiter is in my constellation, and that’s it. I can read the stars and deal a tarot deck, but that doesn’t mean I have any idea what to do with my life.

And there’s a new person. There is a new person. Diana is sitting at her desk, looking as grave and serious as she usually does, as if homeroom is important to her future medical career. But there are two desks behind her instead of just one, and in the one immediately behind her is a boy, looking bored. Except that he is twiddling a pencil between his fingers, and I think that he’s really not bored; he’s tense and anxious and nervous, because he’s new and it’s his first day, and I almost skip my way over to the desk where the teacher has put up a name card for me (yes, like we are in kindergarten). Jupiter is in my constellation. It’s going to be a good year!

“Hi,” I say brightly as I take my seat.

He’s cute but not absurdly so. His hair is like wheat fields in Idaho. I’ve never been to Idaho. I think they have wheat, right? Anyway, it’s golden, but not obnoxiously golden, not surfer-boy golden—a nice, earthy golden, wheat fields and sunshine and straw, I think. I didn’t get a good look at his eyes on my way past, but I did notice that he has freckles, and I like freckles. Who doesn’t like freckles on a nose, right? His twiddling pencil pauses momentarily before starting back up again. “Hi,” he responds. He doesn’t sound surly, but he doesn’t exactly sound welcoming.

But he’s nervous, I think. He probably doesn’t know what to do. “I’m Merrow,” I inform him and hope I don’t sound too crazy enthusiastic (even though I am). “I am Merrow Rodriguez-Chance and I am super excited to meet a fellow R last name.”

The pencil stops again. He twists a bit in his seat so that he can see me better, and I try to think of what he’s going to see. I dyed my hair the colors of the rainbow at the very beginning of the summer, but I haven’t re-dyed it, so the red and blue and purple and green and orange and yellow all start a few inches down, with my natural blond at the roots. I have chosen to do my hair in six knots on my head today. Because why not? And I am wearing my very favorite outfit, my favorite because I like to say it’s a combination of my two mothers: it’s a white button-down shirt and yoga pants. Not going to lie, I look pretty awesome today.

And his eyes are hazel. I’ve never really met someone with hazel eyes before. I feel like people are always trying to pretend their eyes are hazel, and I look at them and nope, they’re just brown. Nothing wrong with brown eyes, people. Own your brown eyes. But New Boy has genuine hazel eyes. They aren’t brown, and they aren’t green, and they aren’t blue. They are all of them, and it’s impressive.

He’s kind of impressive, I think, but not in a way that most girls are going to notice, if their current pick for World’s Most Desirable Guy (Tucker Beaton) is any indication.

New Boy takes me all in and gives me a quizzical sort of smile. He’s got kind of a harsh mouth, actually. Like he’s more used to frowning, or not doing anything at all. Th smile flickers across at it and then is gone. I think of what my mom says when we’re doing particularly tricky and painful yoga poses. Make your face soft, she says. New Boy looks like he’s in the middle of a particularly tricky and painful yoga pose, and a soft face complete with a smile would be too much to ask.

Nervous, I think. Of course. He’s nervous.

“Okay,” he says, like he doesn’t really know what to make of me.

Oh. I realize: new. Maybe they didn’t do alphabetical homerooms where he came from. “Sorry, it’s just we always sit in alphabetical order here, so I have been behind Diana for ages. Did you just move here?”

He looks as if he’s considering the question. “Um,” he says. “Yes.”

Huh. Apparently I’ve stumped him by asking his basic living arrangements. Oh! I want to hit myself in the forehead. Should have asked him his name first! No wonder he’s confused! “Right!” I exclaim, and he blinks and shifts backward a little. “Wait, I’m going to guess your last name. Is it… Roarke?”

“It’s not Roarke,” he says. He looks a little bit amused now, although he still looks more like he doesn’t know what to make of me, but that’s okay—that’s a look I’m used to and can work with. He’s still not smiling though. He’s, like, in the middle of pigeon pose or something.

“Is it Rumford? No, wait, that would put you after me, huh? Hmm.” I look at him and bite my lip and consider. What does he look like? I study the pattern of freckles over his nose and say, “Is it Reading?”

He blinks and stares at me. “Okay, you…looked at… something.” He glances at his desk, as if his name card was still out, but it isn’t.

I am also giddy with delighted disbelief over how awesome that was. “Is it really Reading?”

“Well, we pronounce it like it’s Redding, but yeah, that was pretty damn close. How did you do that?”

I lean close to him and whisper, “Sometimes I can predict the future.” This close, I could probably count the freckles on his nose.

He blinks again and says, “Oh,” and I can tell he’s decided I might actually be crazy.

I lean back and grin. “Only kidding. Th was just a lucky guess. I can’t believe I actually got it. So what’s your first name?”

“Trow,” he says.

“Oh, it’s nice,” I tell him. “I was worried it’d be something like Herbert.”

He’s back to looking quizzical again. “Why would you be worried about that?”

“Parents can do weird things. You know.”

His mouth is back in its very tight line, not a hint of softness to it now, and I never really got a smile but I’d at least got it to soften a bit. “Yeah,” he agrees. “That’s true.”

Uh-oh, I think. Hit a nerve there. I pause and try to think of what I should say next. Trow is back to twiddling his pencil. “I heard a rumor!” Sophie Quillerton is suddenly next to my desk, as if arriving in a whirlwind of squeals. Sophie does a lot of squealing. She speaks at a pitch that is just below the register that is only heard by dogs. And she has trained the rest of her group to speak at this pitch too. It’s not that I don’t get along with Sophie, because really, I get along with everyone since I don’t see the point of starting fights and anyway shanti shanti shanti and all that (that’s a yoga mantra Mom taught me that’s all about peace). But if I were going to stop being a loner and seek out friends at school, I wouldn’t start with Sophie Quillerton.

She has appeared, as usual, with her constant entourage of fellow squealing girls. And she is talking, unsurprisingly, to Trow.

“A rumor there was a new boy.” Sophie finishes her sentence and then sticks out her hand like she’s the World Most Serious Businesswoman. “I’m Sophie.”

Trow shakes it politely and says his name in response. “It’s nice to meet you, Trow. What’s your schedule?”

There is a moment before Trow says, “Oh God, I don’t remember. Um.” He is turning to the ratty backpack that is slumped on the floor next to him.

And that’s when our homeroom teacher, Señora Trillo, who I’ve had for Spanish the past two years and will have for Spanish again this year, because things almost never change here, calls homeroom to order.

She spends forever painstakingly calling the roll, as if she couldn’t just look up and see all of us in our seats.

When she gets to Trow, she says Reading and he corrects Redding, actually and she says, Oh, have they spelled it wrong? And he says, No, it’s spelled like Reading but said like Redding, and then she says, beaming at me, “Y la última, Señorita Rodriguez-Chance.” So that’s how it’s going to be this year, I think. Usually I get last but not least.

“Buenos días,” I reply, which makes her laugh like I’m very clever, and I wonder if we’re going to do this every single day. I look at the back of Trow’s head in front of me, where his hair is a little tangled instead of neatly combed, and I think that doing this every single day might not be so bad.


	2. Chapter 2

I teach a yoga class after school most days. I’ve been doing this forever. When I was really little, Mom used to come pick me up at school and then take me to the yoga studio to hang out for a while, until she was done with her day. This was before she owned her own yoga studio, and her boss was always complaining about having a kid around, as if I were a ton of trouble or something, when all I used to do was sit there quietly and watch. You’d think watching things was a crime, the way some people react to you when you watch things.

Eventually Mom got fed up, and Mother said she should just have her own yoga studio. Mom said she has no head for business, and Mother said, That’s why you have me, and so now we have a yoga studio. It’s called Otherworld Yoga. I asked why it was called that once, and Mom said it was because yoga connects us to the other world that’s out there, where we’re truly from. Mom says stuff like that, like we’re aliens or something, but what she means is just that there’s so much more out there than we know.

I love our yoga studio. It’s in an old house on the East Side of Providence that’s been converted over to businesses.   
On one side of us is an acupuncturist, and on the other side is a person who makes special herbal teas. Mother says they are good complementary businesses for our yoga studio. Above us is the dermatologist who owns the building, who has an office and also lives up there. I think she doesn’t know what to make of her weird tenants, but she’s nice.

Once Mom got her own studio, she said I could start teaching if I logged enough hours, and it’s not like I had a whole bunch of better things to do, so I did it, and now I have one after-school class to run four days a week. Sometimes people from school come, and I coach them through downward- facing dogs and stuff, and I think we could be friendlier than we are. They’re nice and welcoming, and sometimes they’ll say they’re going to grab smoothies after class and ask if I want to come. And I always make up some excuse why I can’t go. I don’t know why I’m like this. Why do I curse myself? I could have friends, I just don’t, and I’m mostly okay with that. Does that mean there’s something wrong with me?

Most of the time when I’m teaching, the only thing I’m thinking about is teaching. That’s the thing about yoga: you’re asking your body to do such funny things so that you can wipe your mind clean. It gives all of your thinking muscles a little break while you work your other muscles. But today when I teach, I’m thinking about Trow Reading and his untidy wheat-colored hair. Trow and I have American literature together and AP U.S. history. Those classes aren’t alphabetically seated, and so Sophie and her pack commandeered Trow to sit with them. And at lunch too, of course. But it’s fine, because I spend lunch meditating.

And anyway, I get to have Trow in front of me every single morning in homeroom. Plenty of time to get to know him better.

Which is weird, because I’ve never been interested in a boy before. I mean, not like Trow. I’ve seen cute boys before, but I’ve never been thinking about the next time I’m going to talk to them. And I’ve only said a few sentences to him. What’s up with that? What’s up with me?

I can’t balance during tree pose because my focus is so off, and Mom says later, “Your poses were a little messy tonight, kiddo.”

“Yeah,” I say with a little sigh and pull a glass of apple- infused water over to me. “I know.”

Mom looks at me closely. “Was it a good first day at school?” I think of Trow. I don’t even know how to begin to bring up Trow, what to say about him. What could I possibly say? There’s a new boy in homeroom. I like him. Oh my God, that sounds so vapid and stupid, like I’m a teenager on some MTV reality show or something.  
I look at Mom and say honestly with a little smile, “Yeah. It was actually a really good day, Mom.”


	3. Chapter 3

Operation Trow isn’t going so well. Not that I actually know what its objective is, mind you. I’m not good at that kind of planning. I try to read the stars about it, about him, but I’ve never been able to read other people’s stars, just my own. Mom can read other people’s stars. I’ve asked her to teach me how to do it, but she says not to worry about it. Worry about it. Like I’m sitting around at night fretting about Mom reading other people’s stars. It’s not like people believe in witches anymore in this day and age; she’s not going to be burned at the stake. And anyway, it’s not like she can actually tell the future. She usually just says things like, It doesn’t seem good, but it’s all fuzzy. What good is that? I love Mom, but really, anybody can make up something like that.

But anyway, back to Operation Trow. I consider it while I’m supposed to be doing shavasana at the end of yoga class the next day. In my head, I have a clear mental list of the ingredients for Operation Trow. Although “ingredients” makes it sound more like a recipe than an operation. What are the components of an operation? Steps? That’s boring. Surgical instruments? More likely.

The surgical instruments of Operation Trow are: Smile. I’m good at smiling. Mother says I’m like Mom and I smile all the time, so that’s good. Do not be high-pitched like a Sophie pack girl. Yup, I can handle that as well, since high-pitched is just so not me. Invite him to yoga. That’s kind of the only thing I can think of to do. I feel like other girls go out for ice cream and stuff. They pop in and out of the sushi and crepe and pizza places on Wickenden Street, twirling hair and flirting and having dates. They go to WaterFire and sit hand in hand, watching the bonfires up and down the river that slices through Providence. It all seems super cute and romantic, and I’ve tried a million times to imagine myself in that situation and can’t. I am Merrow Rodriguez-Chance, with two mothers and rainbow-colored hair and split-personality clothing and a hippie yoga studio. I don’t think I’m allowed in normal-people places like everyone else. I just don’t fit there.

Trow isn’t in school the second day or the third. This is really throwing a wrench into the Operation Trow ingredients/surgical instruments/plans, such as they are. I wonder if he’s ever coming back.

On the fourth day, I am sitting in homeroom doing three- part breaths and counting the number of red cars going by outside, just to have something to do—because homeroom is such a waste of sleeping time, let’s face it—and then there’s a little rippling breeze of squealing from behind me, sweeping through the Sophie pack girls, and then there’s Trow. He settles into the seat in front of me with no warning, and I sit up straight, annoyed, because I didn’t have time to implement my Operation Trow surgical instruments, damn it.

Sophie comes over, complete with pack, of course. They really are mostly a package deal.

“We missed you!” squeals Sophie. “Where were you? Were you sick?”

“No,” replies Trow. He sounds abrupt. I am delighted. I refuse to consider that maybe he sounds abrupt because of my wishful thinking.

If he really does sound abrupt, Sophie doesn’t notice. “Don’t worry,” she continues. “I made sure I was taking really good notes for you.”

“Thanks,” says Trow.

I stare at the back of his head and wish that I could see more. It’s so frustrating that Rodriguez comes after Reading alphabetically. Why couldn’t his name have been Roswell or something?

The bell rings, and Señora Trillo calls us to order. Sophie and the pack girls scatter to their seats, and we all go through the routine of attendance—Señora Trillo says, “Good to see you back,” when Trow says, “Here”—and announcements, and before I know it, homeroom is over and I haven’t gotten a chance to implement any of Operation Trow.

He stands up and slings his backpack over his shoulder, and I know this is my last chance—until tomorrow, yes, but it feels more dramatic than that, last chance—so I blurt out, “Hi.” Did that sound ridiculous? I bet that sounded ridiculous. “Hello,” I correct myself. And now I’ve greeted him twice, which makes me sound like even more of an idiot, but I still hear myself saying, “Hi,” again, as if that’s going to cancel out the last two stupid greetings I made. Operation Trow is turning out to be a disaster. I should abort Operation Trow, I think.

Then he looks up at me. And smiles. He looks tired, but he has such a lovely smile. He’s smiling at me even though I’m an idiot. I bet he smiles at everyone like that. He’s probably just that nice. He seems like he’s just that nice. But still. I like the smile. It’s a glorious smile. He should stop smiling like that—he’s going to snarl up traffic with a smile that beautiful, because everyone will stop to stare at him.

“Hey,” he says.

I remember belatedly that Operation Trow is supposed to involve me smiling. Not just staring at his smile foolishly. So I smile. Sometimes we make ourselves smile during yoga. It’s supposed to relax the body more, trick our brains into thinking we’re happy, concentrating on the many muscles involved in a smile instead of the muscles being a bit uncomfortably forced into chair pose. When I smile now, it is not a smile of effort. It is not many muscles working together; it’s just one muscle—it is just a pure smile. It is the easiest smile of my life. Trow is so easy to smile at.

“Hi,” I say again, and I’m so busy enjoying how much his smile makes me smile that I don’t even realize that I’ve stupidly greeted him yet again.

He gives me a little half wave and goes out to start his school day, as if we did not just have a truly momentous moment together.

And then I admit that I may be in trouble.

***

So I tell my mom that night. We are closing up the yoga studio, and Mom is saying that we’re almost out of wheatgrass and we need to get some. I am standing on the narrow, tree-lined street, looking out at the Providence skyline. I love the yoga studio at this time of year, when the days are on the wane but not yet abysmally short. When we leave, we can stand here on the edge of a gently sloping hill and the sun is just tipping beyond downtown, red just escaping to splash over the sky.

Mom hits the unlock button and her car chirps at her where it’s been parallel parked in front of the studio. This is two-hour parking here, but the cops look the other way for us. Mom says it’s because Mother is such a hotshot lawyer; Mother says it’s because Mom is a good flirt.

“I think I’m in trouble,” I hear myself say, and then I get in Mom’s car.

After a moment where I think she must be frozen with shock, Mom gets hastily into the driver’s seat. “What?” she exclaims. “In trouble how? You can’t just say something like that and then get into the car! I thought your aura was off. It’s been off for days. I knew it! I told Marty, but she said I was reading it wrong. I know I’ve been making some mistakes lately, but I’d never mess up your aura. What is it? What have you done? Don’t worry, don’t panic about it. We’ll fix it. Let’s take a three-part breath.”

I look across at Mom as she sucks in the beginning of a three-part breath, and I love her so painfully much. Her short, shaggy blond hair is an artless mess all over her head, and her yoga shirt has slid off of her shoulder and her pale blue eyes are full of concern. My mom has the most beautiful eyes. I’ve always been sad I didn’t get them.

“I’m not really in trouble,” I say, and I realize I’m grinning, and I can’t help it. I just thought Mom freaking out so imme- diately was cute—what can I say? I have the best mom. “It’s just that there’s a boy.”

“Oh.” Mom relaxes and gives me a knowing smile, and this is kind of why I didn’t want to tell her. Knowing smiles. Like everyone else in the world knows more about all this stuff than I do. Okay, maybe that’s true, but I don’t like to admit it. “A boy. I knew there had to be something.” Mom turns the car on and maneuvers it out of the space.

“No, you didn’t,” I say affectionately.

“I was reading your stars. And there was something. Something I couldn’t quite see. Had to be this boy.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, dubious but indulgent. 

“So. Tell me about him. What’s his name?” 

“Trow.”

“Trow.” Mom draws her eyebrows together. “That’s an unusual name.”

“You named me Merrow.” 

“Yeah, but I’m me.”

“Well, I think it’s a nice name. It suits him. Trow Reading. Isn’t it nice?”

Mom smiles, like his name is funny or something when it’s just nice. But she says, “It is. So tell me what you two talk about.”

And then I feel like an idiot.

Because…we don’t talk, really. Almost not at all. And how can I like him so much when I almost never talk to him? I don’t want to be one of those Sophie pack girls who just likes a boy because he’s cute, even though Trow is undeniably cute. But no: I should have a reason for liking him. Shouldn’t I?

If he came to yoga, I think, frowning, I could get him to go for a smoothie afterward, and then we would find out how much we have to talk about.

“He’s just nice,” I say, because I feel too stupid to say that we’ve never really talked.

“Nice is a good start,” Mom says, and looks at me and grins.


	4. Chapter 4

Aas time wears on, the novelty of Trow seems to wear off for basically everyone but me. Sophie and the pack girls stop squealing around his desk every morning, which is good, because it means I can have him to myself, but I’m frozen in this weird inability to not sound stupid when he talks to me. This is new for me, because I’m not usually like that. In fact, I’m never like that.

But I guess I don’t usually spend a lot of time trying to talk to people. Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve never really exerted effort into getting to know someone before. That makes me sound like a snob, and I’m not, really. I just… was happy how I was. I never met someone before who I looked at and thought, You. I want you to be part of my life.

And that’s how I feel with Trow.

I try to read my stars for signs, but I feel like my stars are a mess. Actually, I can’t see anything at all. I run the astronomy charts, and I turn over the tarot cards, and I sprinkle salt and pepper the way Mom taught me, and everything is fuzzy and unclear.

Every once in a while, Mom says, “How are things going with that boy?” and I’m torn between wanting to die of embarrassment and wanting to ask if she reads anything clearer in my stars and cards and spices than I do. But most of the time when Mom says she reads things clearly, what she says is stuff like, It’s pretty clear the crow will fly counterclockwise. Unless he doesn’t because the river is by the blue car.

Mother is intrigued by “the boy,” but I refuse to talk about him. Because now that I haven’t done anything further when it comes to him, I wish I hadn’t mentioned anything to Mom at all. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and stop myself from ever mentioning Trow. Those are the things I’d do with time travel. It’s probably why human beings shouldn’t invent it.

Trow comes to his seat in homeroom most mornings. He’s absent a lot, but on the mornings when he’s there, he comes in and he says hello to me and he usually manages one of his gorgeous smiles, and I say hi back—usually only once, so I suppose that’s an improvement—and then that. Is. It. I know: it’s super humiliating.  
And then one day, what happens is this: Trow finds me meditating.

I don’t really eat lunch in the cafeteria. I don’t like it in there; it always feels too close and humid and loud, too much nervous energy being expended while people try to flirt with each other across tables and friend groups. To me, navigating the cafeteria is like trying to dash across a six-lane highway. Good luck with that.

So I have an apple and I meditate. I think the principal lets me do this because she thinks it’s part of my religion. She seems to think we are Wiccan or something like that. We’re not, but when I said I wanted to meditate during lunchtime, she acted like it was a religious requirement and agreed to allow it. (I didn’t lead her on in this; I just didn’t correct her. I’m not the daughter of a lawyer for nothing, I’ll have you know.)

I’d like to meditate outside. Outside is the best place to meditate for me. But we’re not allowed outside during the school day for safety reasons, so I just duck into a classroom and meditate there.

And that’s where Trow finds me.

I’m not really meditating. I’m supposed to be, but I’m sitting in a classroom, thinking about Trow.

And that’s when Trow walks in. I would have thought I’d summoned him if I didn’t know that I have absolutely no witchy powers. No useful ones, anyway. Because being able to read messy stars is neither a witchy power nor useful.

Trow draws to a stop two steps into the classroom, spotting me. “Oh,” he says. “I…didn’t… Sorry. I’ll—”

“No,” I blurt, and I’m pleased that finally I was able to get out something to him other than mumbled greetings. “You can stay. I mean. Yes. It’s fine.” Why can I not stop talking and saying stupid things?

Trow regards me for a second. Then he says, as if making a decision, “Okay.” I’m sitting at a desk; he walks over to the teacher’s desk and perches on top of it, so that we’re facing each other.

I smile at him (Operation Trow chief ingredient/surgical instrument: smile at him) but I can’t think of anything else to say. This is apparently my curse when it comes to Trow.

“So.” He sends me that smile he has again. His smile is slow, his lips curling into it a half second after it lights up his eyes. It is also almost always weary, like he smiles reflexively because if it took any more effort, he wouldn’t bother. “What are you up to in here?”

Thinking about you is the real answer, but at least my mouth is intelligent enough not to say that. “Meditating,” I reply.

Trow lifts his eyebrows at me above his brown-green-blue eyes. “Meditating,” he repeats. He sounds a little bit amused, but not in a mean way, not like he’s mocking me.

“Yeah,” I say. “Meditating. Have you ever done it?”

He shakes his head at me. “Where did you pick up meditating?” 

“It clears your brain,” I tell him. “Gets rid of the clutter so you can think.” I do it a lot. In fact, I have to do it before I sit and try to read my stars. If I try to read stars without clearing my brain, I just get a muddle. Granted, my stars have been in a muddle for a little while now, but it used to be that I could at least get pretty clear feelings from them. Like how I knew this was going to be a good year: I saw it in the stars. And then I met Trow and it seemed like it was going to be a good  
year and then the stupid stars shut up.

“Huh” is all Trow says.

Maybe he sounds curious. Does he sound curious? I can’t tell. I wish I could tell when it comes to Trow.

“Come and try it,” I hear myself say, and then I try to pretend I’m not shocked by the words coming out of my own mouth. Shouldn’t I have control over that stuff?

But Trow says, with one of his slow-curling smiles again, “Okay.”

Okay. He said okay. What the stars am I supposed to say now?

He slides off the teacher’s desk and comes to sit in the desk next to mine, and I stare across at him. I’m so used to sitting behind him, to seeing nothing but the back of his head. Now I’m right next to him and I can see every freckle across his face, every individual color in his rainbow eyes.

It’s easier sitting behind him, frankly. I half expect, in my crazy blurting-out state, to say to him, Could you turn around? I prefer to face your back—your front is too distracting.

But what I manage to say is “Oh,” and I wonder how long I’ve been staring at how beautiful he is. I clear my throat and try to remember how to meditate. Yeah, sure, Mom taught me how to meditate when I was still an infant, she claims, and I still do it every day, but Trow makes me forget how to do basic things like breathe, never mind meditate.

“Close your eyes,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, smiling again, and closes his eyes.

Well, good. That makes things a little bit easier, not having that gaze on me.

“Are you closing your eyes?” he asks.

“What?” I say, alarmed. I don’t want to close my eyes. I want to have the luxury of sitting here and admiring him without being worried about him looking back at me.

“Are you closing your eyes too?” he repeats, eyes still closed. 

“Why would I close my eyes?”

He opens his eyes now. “Aren’t you going to meditate too? Isn’t this your meditation time?”

“Well, I don’t have to—”

“I don’t want to sit here and meditate by myself while you stare at me. Seems weird.” He does look vaguely uncomfortable at the prospect. He doesn’t squirm but he looks like he could.

“Okay,” I say slowly. “Yeah. I’ll meditate with you.” I close my eyes.

“Are you cheating?” he asks good-naturedly. 

“No,” I say immediately. “Are you?”

“Uh-uh.”

I squint one eye open to see. His eyes are closed. Feeling a little better, I close my eye again and say, “Okay. Take a nice deep breath and hold it. And then, when you exhale, empty your lungs all the way, all the way out. Every last drop of oxygen, squeeze it out of you. Better to start with lungs full of fresh, new air.”

We are silent for a moment, letting the air move in and then out of our lungs.

“Now,” I say, “on your next inhale, pull the air in deep. Start by expanding your stomach and then filling the air all the way to the very tips of your lungs. Hold it, and then let it all out slowly.”

I can hear Trow following my directions. I’ve never done breathing exercises with just one person before. Well, outside of my mom. And one person who is sitting so close to me. I feel hyperaware of the rhythm of the oxygen moving in and out of his body, keeping him alive and slowing him down all at once. I am so aware of Trow’s rhythm that I am having a hard time finding my own, making the air fill me up and go out as easily as I normally do. I end up trying to match my rhythm to his, just to try to force my frantic heartbeat to calm down.

“Again,” I say, making my voice even softer, following his breathing across from me. “And again. Keep doing it, breathing this way, and clear your mind. Wipe it clean. Think of nothing but your breathing. Focus on it. Focus on the air as you draw it down into you and as you release it from you. In…and out. In…and out. If you have a thought, it’s okay. Recognize that it is a thought, and then push it to the side, and then focus again on your breathing. In…and out. In… and out.” I am practically whispering by this time. Clearing your mind is always so much easier said than done. I am normally very good at it, but right now I am hyperaware that my mind is filled right to the brim, and what it’s filled with is Trow. I feel like I can feel him next to me, even though we’re not touching. I feel like if we kept doing this, this breathing next to each other, I could almost climb into his head, like we could just be one together.

When the bell rings, signaling the end of lunch, it startles me harshly, interrupting my rhythm. I open my eyes and don’t look at Trow immediately, because I don’t feel like I can. Instead, I blink around the classroom, getting used to the level of light. The hallways start filling with noise, and any minute now, this classroom will be invaded by other people, and this whole spell will be broken.

I look at Trow. I don’t know what I want to say, but I know I want to be able to stop time. I wish I had the magic power to stop time.

Trow has a strange look on his face. I can’t read it. “That was…” he says.

I don’t know what the end of that sentence is going to be. And I want to know so badly.

But Trow just says, “Thanks,” and stands up as the next class starts to spill in all around us.

*** 

The next day in homeroom, I have a plan. A better plan than Operation Trow has turned out to be so far. A plan with actual steps. I made myself come up with it the night before and, let me tell you, it was super hard work and I am very pleased with myself. I get to homeroom ready to implement my new plan like I am a military tactician, Napoleon or Julius Caesar or whoever was really good at battles.

But Trow’s not here.

He’s so frustrating, not doing exactly what I want!

That night, I decide I want to read my stars. Reading my stars is such a habit with me. I think I used to do it the way other kids used to suck their thumbs, but then they all grew up and grew out of it, but my habit wasn’t visible to other people and so I never did. But reading the stars fulfills the same mindless comfort that I think thumb-sucking must do to babies, and most of the time I think it’s just as pointless. I do it because it’s familiar, and because I can’t quite kill the hope that one day I will look at them and actually see what Mom seems to think I should see. That I will look at them and there, written in the stars, will be my future. You will do great things. You will have great loves. You will be happy. But instead I look at the stars and all I get from them, if I’m lucky, are general feelings. Vague unrest there, something exciting happening here. It’s like reading fortunes in a fortune cookie or something. And they’ve just been a mess lately, like my stars can’t make up their minds about anything.

And still I keep reading them, compulsively, hoping for the day when my stars stop being as scatterbrained as I feel and provide some actual help about what I ought to do with my life.

I shove open my bedroom window and my screen, and climb half out, perching on the windowsill. Mother hates it when I do this, but she’s never been able to get us to stop it, me or Mom.

I sit there and tip my head back and look up at the stars over my head. Here’s the secret about stars that a lot of people don’t bother to pay attention to, I guess: if you narrow your eyes and look through your eyelashes, the stars swirl into clouds, into the Milky Way, and they dance over your head, and in that dance can be a message. I don’t always read my stars this way. Sometimes I just chart an astrology chart, or I flip the tarot cards, or I scatter the salt and pepper, or I peer into the dancing dust motes. Mom’s taught me innumerable things around me to “read,” even though I think mostly we’re just imagining all of it. But the thing I love most is this: I love to make the stars dance. And I love to see if they have anything to say.

Tonight the stars are the same stubborn mess they have been for a while. They dance over my head, through my eye- lashes, but I can’t feel anything from them. And definitely nothing about Trow. Trow feels to me like he is not the stars: he is the dark of the night sky between them.

Trow’s in school the next day, and I don’t give myself time to think myself out of it. I launch myself into the plan he delayed with his absence the day before.

“So,” I announce.

He turns in his chair and smiles at me. He looks tired, but then he always looks tired, and that never diminishes the power of his smile on me. “What’s up?” he asks.

“You should come to my yoga class.” Yes, I think. Good job. Super straightforward and hopefully charming as a result. Nailed it. Definitely.

He regards me for a moment. Then he lifts an eyebrow in evident confusion and says, “Is that a euphemism for something…?”

I feel myself blush hotly. “No! It’s a…not-euphemism. A real thing. I teach a yoga class. Not really meditation, but, you know, you might like it.”

“You teach a yoga class,” he repeats, as if he can’t get his head around this.

“Yeah. My mom owns a yoga studio.”

He glances at my rainbow hair and his smile quirks at me again. “I shouldn’t be surprised about that, should I?”

“So you should come.”

He hesitates. “Yoga…isn’t really my thing.” 

“Have you ever tried it?”

“No,” he admits slowly.

“Then how do you know? You liked the meditation,” I remind him and then wonder, Did he like the meditation? I guess we never really talked about it. I just assumed. Maybe I’m being too pushy. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe I am the world’s worst military tactician. Maybe I’m the anti-Napoleon. Maybe I should order some kind of retreat. “I mean,” I correct myself, “did you like the meditation? I thought you liked the meditation—”

“It was fine, it was… Thanks for the invitation.”

I can tell when I’m being politely brushed off, and it stings. It stings more than it should. It’s not like my life is riding on whether or not this boy comes to my yoga class. This is not actually military tactics. He’s just a boy and it’s just a yoga class. But I feel irrational when it comes to Trow. And I feel annoyed by that. Mother always says that I am composed of yin and yang, warring together. There is all of her practical pragmatism warring with Mom’s star-gazing intuition. I came from only one of them, but they are both raising me, and I cannot help that they seem to both sit inside my heart, frowning at every choice I make for being too risky or not risky enough. I have acted a lot like Mom when it comes to Trow; maybe it’s time to act like Mother.

Objectively speaking, he is just a cute boy who sits in front of me in homeroom, and I am being ridiculous.


	5. Chapter 5

I sit in my room and turn over tarot cards, and nothing makes any sense. I don’t get why everything I try to read these days is like this. It’s like someone splashed water all over the later pages of a novel and now I’m trying to piece together blurred letters or something. In my tarot cards, the Magician keeps showing up, and the High Priestess, and the Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes the Empress is there, and sometimes the Hierophant, and sometimes the Chariot. Sometimes Strength, and sometimes the Hermit, and sometimes the Moon. Sometimes Judgment, and sometimes the World. The Hanged Man shows up with a frequency I don’t like, and Death, and the Tower. But never the Lovers. In fact, it seems like the Lovers is the only card that never shows up, no matter how many times I shuffle the deck.

I know better than to believe that cards tell us the future. Nothing tells us the future. Nothing on this world, Mom likes to say. But the cards can give you a feeling, like the stars on a good night. These cards aren’t giving me any feelings though. These cards are all over the place. These cards are just a mess; they are everything and nothing all at once.

Mom knocks on my open bedroom door. Mother’s working late, so Mom looks a little bit like she doesn’t know what do with herself. Mother gives Mom balance. If my yin and yang war inside of me, Mom’s and Mother’s yin and yang coexist nicely.

“Reading cards?” she asks.

“Oh, trying to, but they’re being…nonsense.”

“Well, you know how cards can be,” Mom says, wandering in. “Deal them for me.”

I do as she says—Magician, High Priestess, Wheel of Fortune. Hierophant, Strength, Judgment.

Mom’s eyes flick over them, and she goes super pale. 

Confused, I look back at the cards.

“Mom,” I say, because I feel some need to reassure her, she looks so stricken. “They’re just cards.”

“Deal them again,” says Mom.

I don’t know that I want to, given the way she’s looking, given the tone of her voice. “I don’t know if—”

“Deal them again,” Mom practically snaps at me. Which she never does. Mom’s not like that. Mom is all shanti at all times.

I swallow and brace myself and deal the cards again— Magician, High Priestess, Wheel of Fortune. Hermit, Judgment, Death.

Mom makes this squeak of a noise. I get the sense it would have been a scream if she’d let it out all the way.

“Mom,” I say, trying to be soothing. It’s not a job I usually have, soothing Mom. I wish Mother was here; I feel like she’d be much better at this. “It’s nothing. You know how cards are. They’re just—”

Mom snatches the cards up. “Don’t deal them again.”

She was the one who just demanded that I deal them again. “Okay,” I say slowly, looking up at her frantic face. Really, what is her deal? I think of the Death card and wonder if she’s taking it really seriously. “Mom. You know that cards don’t really tell the future, right?” I’ve been going along with this idea my whole life, but I don’t know that it’s anything more than just finely tuned intuition, like Mother says. I’ve been humoring Mom, thinking she wasn’t really serious, that it was just elaborate playacting, like making jokes about Santa Claus, but right now it seems like there is nothing more deadly serious than tarot cards for Mom.

Mom’s pale eyes are sharp and intense and burning. She seems nothing at all like my easygoing hippie Mom. “Don’t deal them again,” she says flatly, and turns on her heel, my deck still in her hands, and marches out of my room.

***

I don’t bring up the tarot cards again, but it doesn’t matter: I feel like I’m walking on eggshells now around Mom. She and I usually have such a good rapport. We’re a lot like each other, and that makes for not a lot of tension. I know many teenage daughters have roaring fights with their moms and slam a lot of doors and are totally misunderstood, and I’ve always felt very lucky that my mom and I aren’t like that.

But I feel like we are making up for all of the previously missing tension now. I feel like our lives are nothing but tension. We are like a guitar string that’s been tuned too tightly and is going to snap if touched. I don’t play the guitar, but I assume that’s how that works. We barely talk at the yoga studio, other than for benign pleasantries, because I’m scared to bring up anything more serious, scared she’ll get that look in her eyes again, scared of the merest brush against the taut guitar string of our relationship.

Mother notices. Of course she does. Mother notices everything, especially about me and Mom.

Mother knocks on my door when I am in the middle of looking at the stars through my lashes. They are not dancing tonight. They are not doing much of anything. I feel like I’ve lost a little piece of myself, without the tarot cards and the stars. I don’t dare go down and get salt. I’m realizing that, in a weird way, Mom and the stars and the cards and the other odd stuff in my life have always been my friends. And now I’ve lost them. And I don’t really have other friends.

“What are you up to, Mer?” Mother asks. She asks it almost breezily, as if she wants to be able to pretend that there hasn’t been tension all through our house for the past few days.

And now that Mother’s here, in my room, giving me an opening, I find that I want to tell her everything. Why was I resisting this before?

“Did you talk to Mom?” is how I start.  
“No.” Mother sits on my bed. “She won’t talk. She keeps telling me there’s nothing wrong, but I don’t believe that for a second.”

“I dealt tarot cards the other night.” 

Mother lifts an eyebrow. Effectively: So?

“And I don’t know what happened but Mom, like, went a little crazy. She took the cards and told me not to deal again, and ever since then, she hasn’t really talked to me.”

Mother looks thoughtful. “What was the deal?” 

“The deal?” I echo.

“Yeah. When you dealt the cards, what did they show?” 

“Well…I don’t know. I mean, you know how the cards are. It’s not like they can actually tell the future or anything. They’re just cards. I was only dealing them to see about this boy at school who—”

It tumbles out of my mouth before I even realize it, and then I want to take it back, because oops! I didn’t want to bring up Trow, given how stupid I’ve behaved around him and the fact that nothing has really happened between us since he blew me off about yoga. It seems silly to talk about Trow when anything with him is basically completely nonexistent. I really am the worst military tactician ever. It’s a good thing I found this out over a boy instead of in some kind of, like, real battle situation.

“This is the boy?” Mother asks. She looks curious. Not mocking. And I consider. Mother gives good advice. Maybe I should have asked Mother for advice earlier. Mother is good with plans. And my Operation Trow could desperately use some help, let’s face it.

“Yes. The new boy. Trow.”

Mother smiles now. “Trow. Nice name. And you like him?”

Yes. “I barely know him,” I say honestly. “He’s just…” I search for the proper adjective.

“Cute?” Mother suggests.

Yes. He is. Definitely. But… “Nice,” I correct.

“Nice,” says Mother, and her smile widens. “Even better.” 

“But it’s not like we’ve really… I mean, he meditated with me one day.”

“That’s a good start, right?”

“Yes. I guess. Except that then I asked him to yoga and he didn’t seem into that at all and now I don’t know what to do. We basically say hi to each other in the morning and that’s it. How am I supposed to…” I make a noise of utter frustration and trail from the window over to my bed, where I collapse melodramatically. “How do other people do this?”

Mother chuckles and brushes the rainbow hair away from my face. “Mostly luck.”

“That’s what I figured. That’s why I was dealing the tarot cards.”

“Maybe yoga was the wrong way to his heart,” remarks Mother, smiling.

“But it’s yoga,” I protest. It is part of my heart. I feel like he should see that if we are meant to be. If we are written in the stars.

“Right, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and sometimes you need persuasion to try things you’re not used to trying. I remember when I met your mom, she was always going on about yoga and trying to get me to go with her, and I thought she was a lunatic with all this talk about lion poses and cobra poses. It’s not like yoga was our first date. Yoga might have been our hundredth date, honestly. But now I like it—it just took some time. So I’m just saying that maybe yoga wasn’t your best opening.”

I consider this. “What was Mom’s opening with you?” 

Mother smiles, remembering a time that is so long ago that I feel like it ought to exist in fairy tales. “You know that story. She came to me for help with her misdemeanor for writing ‘Love more, hate less’ on a city bus.”

“I know, but I mean, what was her opening? If it wasn’t yoga?”

“Well, it was my opening,” Mother says. “Mom didn’t do anything at all.”

“Okay. So what was your opening?”

“Coffee,” says Mother, and smiles and then ruffles my hair like I’m three years old, which I let her do because I’m super nice like that. “Don’t worry about your mom and the tarot cards, Mer. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

*** 

Coffee. Coffee seems doable. Not that I drink coffee, but maybe Trow does and I can find something else to drink. It doesn’t feel like me, because it just feels so normal, and I have never felt normal, but maybe Mother’s right. Maybe I just need an opening to convince Trow to give me a second look. To think me of that way.  
And to be honest, to make sure I want to think of Trow that way too.

So the next time he’s in school, I don’t give myself time to overthink it. Operation Trow’s new mission is: ASK HIM OUT FOR COFFEE AS SOON AS YOU SEE HIM. So  
that’s why he hasn’t even sat down yet before I blurt out, “Do you want to go for coffee?”

He blinks at me and says, “Oh. I. When? Now?”

I think I’m probably blushing. “No. Not now. Whenever. I mean. Sometime in the future, of course.”

Now he looks amused. “Well, I didn’t think it would be in the past.”

“The near future,” I amend, hearing myself talking more and more and more to try to make it better. I keep doing this with him! Talk more and more and more to make it better and I end up just making it worse! “Like, maybe, after school. Can you do after school?”

Trow hesitates. He drops his eyes from me and looks out the window. I always know where Trow’s eyes are looking because I love when they’re looking at me and I resent when they’re looking at anything else. Even though whenever they do look at me, I make a complete idiot of myself. “After school’s tough for me,” answers Trow finally.

“Today?”

“Every day,” he says, and then he looks at me.

And now I wish he weren’t looking at me, because I’m sure that the impact of what he said is visible on my face; like a hot iron being slapped against my cheek, it burns and stings horrendously. This is another magic power that it would be useful to have. Some people have it and I am phenomenally jealous of them: the power to stop blushing.

“Right,” I stammer. “Right. Fine. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Sorry—” 

“I don’t mean it like—”

“No, no,” I say, attempting to be breezy. Shanti, I tell myself. Take a three-part breath. Find distance. Clear it all out of your head. “No big thing. Doesn’t matter.”

“No, Merrow. It does—”

It’s the first time he’s said my name, and it sends a weird vibratory ring through me, like I’m a bell he’s just struck. It’s weird, because all he did was say my name, but it feels…odd. Tingly. Something like the pleasure-pain sensation of waking up your foot after it’s gone to sleep on you.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say through the smile that’s now plastered on my face. Back when I had an Operation Trow, it was all about the smiles, I remind myself. Operation Trow is over now, of course, because I really need to stop being desperate and pathetic, but no need to stop smiling. In fact, smiling is the best way not to be desperate and pathetic. I’m sure I read that on a fortune cookie somewhere or something. “Really, really doesn’t matter.”

The bell rings. Trow leans over, closer to me, and I shrink back instinctively, because it is unforgivable to me that he should enter my personal space for the first time after brushing me off again.

“No,” he insists. “What I mean is—”

“Señor Reading? Señorita Rodriguez-Chance? Care to acknowledge the existence of homeroom?” Señora Trillo calls to us.

Homeroom is stupid and I have never once cared to acknowledge it, but today I am seized with the fierce conviction that homeroom is the most important class ever because it means that Trow has to stop talking to me.

Trow frowns and reluctantly takes his seat, reluctantly faces the front of the classroom. I refuse to look at the untidy mop of his wheat-blond hair the way I usually do. It’s a stupid view and I don’t want anything to do with it anymore. Stupid Trow Reading, who keeps turning around to hiss at me as if we have things to discuss when he has made it quite clear— twice—that we have nothing to discuss. I reinforce the fact that I have a test in history next Thursday by writing the word test in purple ink over and over again, until the letters actually cut through the paper, and I refuse to look up.

The bell rings, and I say to Trow again, “Doesn’t matter,” and send him another bright-white smile, and then I dart away.

*** 

Trow finds me while I’m not meditating at lunch. I mean, I should be meditating, but I am sitting there staring out the window and going over every interaction with Trow and being mortified by how much I’ve been throwing myself at him and how much he’s been showing me he’s not interested and how much I’ve been ignoring the signs. Me! I read signs in everything! I read signs in stars dancing through my eyelashes, in the spill of salt and pepper together when you shake them! Worst. Julius Caesar. Ever.

The knock on the door startles me out of this reverie, and I am even more startled when I look up and Trow is there.

He looks uncertain. “Um,” he says. “Can I come in?”

And I feel my temper snap. Bad enough that he doesn’t want anything to do with me, but now he insists on talking to me about how he doesn’t want anything to do with me. Shanti can go to hell, because I am furious right now and not interested in finding peace to counter it.

“No,” I snap.

He looks surprised, as if he expected me to be all meek and devastated and mopey and invite him in. “What?”

“No.” I uncross my legs from where I have been sitting on top of a random desk and march over to the classroom door and slam it in his face.

I enjoy the look of surprise on his face. Possibly I enjoy it too much. I may be feeling a bit smug as I turn away from him.

Then he opens the door back up, and I really can’t believe his audacity. (Audacity is a good word and I’ve been meaning to use it more often, and I guess I should be glad Trow gave me the opportunity.)

“What can you possibly want?” I demand in disbelief, turning on him.

“To talk to you,” Trow retorts. “Which you’re making amazingly difficult to do.”

“Not true!” I shout. “We could have done a lot of talking over coffee! I was making that super easy for you!”

“And now you’re making it super difficult for me to talk to you about the coffee!” he shouts back.

“Because you didn’t want to go to coffee!” I remind him angrily. “I asked you to go to coffee, and you said you couldn’t go to coffee, and now you want to talk to me about how you don’t want to go to coffee? Sorry, I don’t want to rehash how you don’t want to hang out with me. I don’t think we need to get into the specific reasons why you don’t like me. I don’t need any more details.”

Trow blinks at me for a second, as if he cannot believe that my opinion is that I don’t want to hear any more about his opinion of me. “You think that’s what this is about?” he asks finally.

“You wanting to come in and talk to me about not wanting to go to coffee with me?” I don’t understand what he’s so confused about.

“I like you,” Trow says.

Yeah, I think. Sure. Easy enough for him to say because he can say it while saying the but after it. I like you, but… He’s trying to let me down easier than he did this morning in homeroom, and that’s nice of him, I guess, but I’m not in the mood to let him. I don’t want his pity. I don’t want him to think I’m some kind of excitable girl like a member of Sophie’s pack who needs to be treated gently in case I go rabid and snap.

Well, I consider. Maybe I have gone a little bit rabid and snapped on him here.

I take a three-part breath, and when I open my eyes, Trow is looking at me warily, like he doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. Good. I like to keep people guessing. Wouldn’t do to be too written in the stars, would it?

“It’s fine,” I say and try a smile on for size again. “It’s fine. It was just a silly—I mean, never mind. We don’t have to—” 

Trow takes a few steps closer to me, close enough now that he is in my personal space entirely. He is taller than me, just slightly, and I have to lift my eyes a little to maintain eye contact with him. His eyes are hot and bright, and even though he isn’t touching me at all, I feel like he could be. And I feel like he has sucked the air out of the space around us, like we are suddenly in a vacuum, floating up among the stars, and I couldn’t try a three-part breath if I wanted to—I couldn’t  
even inhale.

Trow says firmly, eyes blazing down at me, “No. I like you. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone even remotely like you.”

And then what Trow Reading does is kiss me. Like, seriously. I am not even joking here. He just cups his hands around my face and presses his lips to mine, and he is the world’s most excellent kisser, and he certainly kisses like he really, really likes me.

When he’s done kissing me, I’m confused, and I don’t think it’s just because he’s kissed me.

“But you don’t want to go to yoga,” I say and then can’t resist leaning up to press my lips back up against his.

“In fairness,” he says, his lips curling into one of his wry smiles against my lips, and how amazing is that, “that invitation caught me off guard.”

“You don’t want to go to coffee,” I say.

“I can’t,” he says and shakes his head a little bit. “I’m not good at… My life is…”

I think of my two mothers, one a fortune-telling hippie and the other a straight-laced lawyer. “It can’t be any crazier than my life,” I tell him.

He laughs a little bit without amusement. “You’d be surprised.”

“Try me,” I challenge him.

He looks down at me for a second, his eyes searching all over my face, as if he’s going to find the answer written there, as if my face contains the constellations, the dancing dust motes, salt and pepper, and cinnamon and sugar. “Maybe I will,” he says musingly.

I wait, barely breathing, but Trow doesn’t tell me about his life. He takes a few steps away from me—a situation that I don’t necessarily support—and perches on the teacher’s desk and says, “So. Yoga, huh? Tell me how that got started.”

“My mom owns a yoga studio,” I reply and sit up on the desk next to him, feeling daring for doing it.

“That is very cool,” says Trow.

“And my other mom is a lawyer,” I say, figuring I should get all the confusing aspects of my life out of the way immediately. 

“Two moms.” Trow gives me a look that is caught between confusion and something else I can’t quite place. “You have a profusion of moms.”

“I’m just super lucky that way,” I say, and I say it lightly but actually I really mean it a lot.

Trow smiles again and says, “Which of them is the Rodriguez and which of them is the Chance?”

“The lawyer’s the Rodriguez. The yoga teacher’s the Chance. She likes to tell me that her name is the most appropriate name in this world, Chance.” I can’t believe (a) how much I’m talking, and (b) how coherently I’m talking. This is the easiest I’ve ever felt with Trow. I guess it did us good to get the first kiss out of the way quickly.

“It’s a pretty great name,” Trow agrees with me. 

“Reading’s not so bad.”

“It confuses everyone.” 

“Oh, and Trow doesn’t?”

“You’re one to talk, Merrow.”

“So our moms both have strange taste in names.” I shrug. “I like having an odd name. Don’t you?”

“Not really.” Trow says it thoughtfully. “I think I’d rather blend in. But I can see how you’re made to stand out.”

I’m a little bit embarrassed by that assessment. “Not really,” I say.

Trow lifts an eyebrow at me. “You expect me to believe that? You’ve got rainbow hair. And you don’t dress like anyone I’ve ever met. You’re so you; it’s fantastic. You’re not like any other girl here.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing.” 

“Of course it’s a good thing.”

I look from Trow to the window. Outside, cars are passing. I automatically start counting red ones, in order to have something to think about that’s not Trow and what I’m saying to Trow. “No one really seems to notice me.”

“How can you say that? How can anyone not notice you? You’re the only interesting thing in this entire school. Maybe in this entire state.”

“Well,” I say, trying to maintain lightness as I look back at him, “there’s no need to go that far. There’s no need to be ridiculous.”

Trow grins.

I hear myself saying, “I don’t know why no one notices me. I feel like their eyes all pass right over me. Like I don’t factor into the world for them. Or maybe I feel that way. I’ve just always felt like I don’t belong here.”

Trow looks at me for a second. And then he says, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

***

That night, I am walking on air, and all the tension about the tarot cards seems very far away. I expect Mom or Mother to sense the change in my mood and ask questions, but they don’t and I am relieved because I kind of don’t want to answer these questions right now.

The next day, Trow brings coffee into homeroom, and he gets into trouble for it but not before he is able to give me one of those heart-stopping grins, and I face the facts: probably, regardless of what the tarot cards say or don’t say, I am in love.


	6. Chapter 6

"I want to hear about you,” I say as we settle into our usual classroom for our lunch meditation that now has nothing to do with lunch or meditation. We are both on the broad windowsill, leaning up against the wall behind us. I have my legs up, my arms around my knees, my chin resting on them, and I am worrying on a hangnail that has been bothering me all day. I hate hangnails; once I get them, I can’t stop torturing myself by making them worse. That probably says something about me, but I refuse to think about that.

Trow is sprawling a little bit as he responds, “I’m not that interesting.”

“Of course you are. Don’t you think that the boy the most interesting person in the state of Rhode Island finds interesting must be a pretty interesting person in his own right?”

“You get that kind of logic from your lawyer mom,” Trow accuses me good-naturedly. Trow is smiling. I love how he is almost always smiling at me.

I can’t help but smile back. “She has tried to be a tempering influence on me,” I tell him. “Otherwise she says I’d grow up all flighty, like Mom. I need to get my yin and yang in balance.”

“Your yin and yang, huh?”

“We talk like that in my house.”

“I bet. Which one is your real mother? Or is either of them? Wait, is that question too much?”

“No.” I’m used to questions like that; they don’t bother me. “My mom is my birth mother. The yoga studio one. She was raising me on her own when she met my mother.” I leave out the circumstances of their meeting. Sometimes people are funny about that. I like Trow and I trust him, but I’m not quite ready just yet to spill all of that.

“How old were you?”

The question catches me by surprise. “I…don’t know,” I admit.

Trow blinks. “You don’t know?”

“No, I…” I’m confused, because shouldn’t I know this? They tell me the stories of that time, and it all feels very long ago, but how long ago? “I must have been very young. I guess probably still a baby. Because I don’t remember a time before Mother. But I don’t know how old I was. I guess I never really asked.”

“What about your father?” 

“My father?” I echo.

“Yeah,” says Trow. And then he abruptly backpedals, as if he realizes now that asking about my father was a faux pas. “Never mind, I didn’t—”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I say automatically, because I think that’s the response you’re supposed to give, but actually I’m sitting there wondering about this myself. I’ve never asked about my father. Could that be right? I have no recollection of ever asking my mom about my father, ever. He’s never been a part of my life, and she’s never mentioned him, and I’ve just followed her cue and never asked.

Is that normal? That can’t be normal. Then again, it’s not like I’ve ever been super normal.

“Wait,” I say as I realize it. “You’re not going to trick me that easily. We were supposed to be talking about you today.” 

“Okay.” He cocks his head to the side. “What if I told you that I have seven sisters?”

I consider that. “And how many brothers?” 

He smiles. “None.”  
“So it’s you and seven girls? 

“It’s me and seven girls.” 

“Theoretically,” I say.

He chuckles a bit. “No, it’s for real. I didn’t mean to make it sound like it wasn’t for real. I have seven little sisters.”

“Seven little sisters.” I try to wrap my mind around that. When you’re an only child, having just one other person around with you seems impossible, never mind seven. Seven. Is that enough for a baseball team? Surely enough for some kind of sports team.

Trow nods and rattles names off. “Tabitha, Tacita, Taevyn, and Talon, Taheara and Taffy and Tam.” There is a rhythm to the way he says the names, like they are part of a nursery rhyme. Probably he’s just really used to reciting his sisters’ names. Probably he needed some kind of mnemonic just to remember them.

“And how old are they?” I ask.

“I’m the oldest, and they’re all younger. The triplets are the youngest; they’re only three.”

“Triplets,” I echo. I can’t even imagine this. I don’t even have cousins. I’m not sure I would even know what to do with triplet three-year-olds. “Wow,” I say. And then I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I bet your house is never quiet.”

Trow laughs. Trow has a great laugh, rich and deep, like when you’re out on the ocean and you look down and you can see the first layer and then you realize that there’s another layer underneath—that’s what Trow’s laugh is like. He doesn’t laugh very often, but I’m always happy when he does. “No,” he agrees wryly. “Not frequently.”

I wonder if that’s why he looks so tired almost all the time. It must be exhausting to be the oldest of eight. It must be even more exhausting to be the oldest of eight when the youngest is still a baby. When the three youngest are still babies.

I also wonder if this is why he says he can’t do things after school. I wonder if he has to go home and help out. That would make sense. I wish he’d just told me that, instead of being so enigmatic about it and making me think the worst. Never give a stargazer too little information; we fill it in with the most fanciful crises.

“Is your house very quiet?” he asks.

“Well, we do a lot of meditating, Mom and I. I’m guessing you don’t really get meditation time at home.”

“No.” Trow grins at me. “We really, really don’t.”

***

I never talk about Trow at home. Mom would normally be my natural confidante about him. But things have been weird between Mom and me since the night of the tarot card incident. It’s been weeks now, but it still hasn’t quite fixed itself. I wish that I could tell them all about Trow—I am bursting with things to say about him—but I can’t talk about him because I am worried they will make less of him somehow. So I am careful not to say anything that might be out of the ordinary, anything beyond completely commonplace and dull. I don’t want to give Mom any more reason to worry. And me talking about a boy would definitely be out of the ordinary, especially since it all started with me dealing tarot cards about the boy.

It would also be weird for me to start asking questions about my father. I know that. All my life, I’ve never bothered to ask a single question. To ask one now—when Mom is already on edge because of some perceived danger with the tarot cards—would definitely be a big red flag to them. I don’t want them to think that Trow might be connected to that red flag, even though it is Trow’s question that started me thinking about him. I don’t want to do anything that might seem suspicious; I don’t want to be the focus of any more attention than I already am. So I don’t mention Trow and I don’t ask any questions about my father and I keep my head down, and I go to school and come home from school and teach my yoga classes and do my homework, and that is basically my life.

And that has always been my life, so it’s strange to me how empty and hollow it feels, now that Trow has been inserted into it. I imagine my life as being one enormous pie chart. There is a super big slice of it that is bright, sunny yellow— because yellow is happy—that is labeled “Time with Trow.” And then there is this other slice of it that is beige that is labeled “Everything Else.”

It’s not like I have turned into one of those girls who is so obsessed with a boy that she drops everything else. I still teach my yoga classes and have dinner with Mother and Mom. But the truth is that I have never before had much in my life beyond that. I have always been kind of a loner; I have never really had friends. When I was little, Mother and Mom were worried about that and tried to make me have friends, but it never really worked out. And I wasn’t sad about that, and I wasn’t lonely, and eventually they made a decision that, well, life is about being happy, and if you’re happy how you are, then what does it matter how society thinks you ought to be happy? That’s what makes so many people unhappy, you know, chasing the things that society tells them should make them happy. I see it all the time with the people in my yoga class, working all day at high-powered jobs they hate because they thought it would be a good thing to get high-powered jobs. It is not a good thing, not all the time, not unless you love it the way Mother loves her job. If you love it because you love it, that’s good; if you love it because you think you ought to love it, that’s not so good. At least, that’s what Mother and Mom always taught me.

All of this is a super long, roundabout way of saying that I was never lonely before I met Trow. And then I met Trow and I realized what people meant when they said they get lonely. Before, I was just, like, how could anyone be lonely when there was so much around you in the world? But I miss Trow when I’m not with him, even when I’m with Mother and Mom.

This is silly, right? I feel like it’s silly. So I definitely don’t tell Trow how I feel. But I am honest with myself, because that’s important, and with myself, I admit that the time with Trow is the best.

We spend every lunch together, talking. Trow tells me about his sisters. It sounds like absolute chaos, but it’s hilarious.

I tell Trow about the yoga classes, where there is one woman who refuses to do yoga from anywhere except up against a corner so that she can keep an eye out for gnomes that might creep out of the heating vents, and the acupuncturist, who has started a dating blog but is insistent she only date men who show up to the first date with blue shirts, which has meant a lot of rejection.

“How do you know so many crazy people?” Trow asks me, grinning, as I tell these stories.

I hesitate, considering. “Are they crazy?” To me, these are just the people I know. They are definitely no more crazy than, say, Sophie and her pack. In fact, they are way less crazy than Sophie and her pack, in my view. I wasn’t really telling these stories to tell stories about crazy people; I was just telling these stories to tell Trow about people I know.

I don’t really ask Trow why he’s absent so much—because he still does miss a lot of school—and he doesn’t volunteer any information. I think his family life sounds understandably insane, and maybe he needs to help out his mother, and maybe he’s embarrassed to tell me that. I can understand being protective of parents who don’t quite fit the mold. It’s why I’m always so close-lipped about Mom. So I don’t ask him, because I figure someday he’ll tell me if it’s important, and it’s probably not important anyway. Trow is who he is, and I know who he is, and I don’t need to know every detail of his home life to know that—any more than he needs to know about the time that I spend looking at stars through my eyelashes to try to get a feeling about my future with him. I am teaching Trow yoga positions, slowly. We can’t do much on the disgusting, dusty floors of the school, but we do variations on child’s pose on the wide windowsill, and sometimes we spread out our respective sweaters and do legs up against the wall, lying on our backs next to each other and talking. I love this pose. It feels very cozy and intimate, just the two of us in an inversion, the blood rushing down and making our hearts beat and our heads buzz.

It is when we are in this position that I say it, finally. We’re having a vague conversation in which Trow is talking about my yoga class.

“I would love to come to it someday, and at the same time, I think I would be offended when it turns out not to be a private class just for me.” He grins across at me. “I mean, how dare you teach other people the magic of proper breathing?” he teases gently. And then, “What got your mom into yoga in the first place? Was it because it was trendy?”

I am almost offended on Mom’s behalf. “She was doing yoga long before it became trendy,” I defend her. “She’s always been doing yoga.” I consider. “I think it…I think it connects her to the other world.”

“What other world?”

I’ve never actually asked. Mom says stuff like that and I don’t ask questions, because why would I? To me, when she says things like that, they make a vague sort of sense that doesn’t need to be challenged. “I don’t know, the world that’s not this one,” I answer. “Don’t you miss it?”

“Miss what?” Trow looks quizzical, but in a gentle way, like I am amazing and remarkable, and he’s quite happy with me and all my strangeness. I don’t think it’s strangeness though. I think it’s strange that other people don’t live this way.

“Miss…the world that’s not ours. Don’t you feel like there’s something more, something more than all this, and you just can’t get there? But it would be so lovely if you could. You wouldn’t feel half a step behind everyone anymore; you’d just be…you’d just be you and you’d be home. Sometimes I feel homesick and I’ve lived in the same place my entire life.” I want to hide my face—I can feel myself blushing—but I don’t. Trow looks so open and accepting and fond, and I can’t look away from him. “I must sound crazy.”

“No. You sound exactly like you. Which is…charming and magnificent. And flexible.”

I laugh, because I can’t help it. Then I hear myself saying, “At night, do you ever just sit and look up at the stars?” I look up at the ceiling, seeing a carpet of stars over my head, not the gross drop ceiling littered with marks.

“No,” says Trow. 

“You should,” I say.

“Is that where the other world is?”

I close my eyes, seeing the stars the way I see them, hazy in my lashes, swaying through my vision. “When I look up at the stars, they dance.”

There is a moment of silence. “Dance how?” Trow is speaking in a hushed tone, and I understand why. It feels like, if we were loud, at this moment, it would ruin everything.

“If you knew how to read them the right way, they would tell you everything. Everything you could ever need to know—the future, the past, all of it. Right there in the stars.” I open my eyes and turn my head to look at Trow.

He is gazing at me solemnly. He doesn’t look like he thinks what I’m saying is silly. In fact, he looks deeply impressed by it. “What do the stars say about us?” he asks, his voice hoarse. 

“It’s unclear,” I admit. “But I ask them every night, just in case this is the night when it changes.”

Trow smiles at me. It used to be that Trow’s smiles were always tired, but now when he smiles at me, they are bright and unshadowed. I wonder if anything in the history of time has ever been as important as making Trow Reading smile like that.

Trow says, “What if I start asking the stars every night too?” And then he kisses me, a soft, lovely press of his lips against mine, and I could sink into him and stay there until every star fell out of the sky. I feel like I can see the stars falling out of the sky, there behind my eyelids.

I say, against him, “Let me know what they say.”

“I think they’ll say, ‘It’s a good thing you got that girl coffee,’” says Trow.

Trow is too good with lines sometimes, I think. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love them all anyway.

*** 

“So,” says Mother as she sits on my bed and grins at me.

I look at her over the top of my book. It’s Mythology. Because you can never know too much about mythology. It can be super useful when it comes to the stars.

“This boy you’re seeing,” Mother continues.

I feel myself blush. Stupid blushing. “I’m not really ‘seeing’ him,” I say.

“I’m a lawyer, Mer,” says Mother. “I read people for a living. You think I can’t tell when my daughter has a crush that’s going well instead of being frustrating with the boy, the way she used to be?”

Mother is in cross-examination mode. I know better than to try to fight that mode. “Fine,” I relent. “Yes. It’s going well-ish.”

“Well-ish.” Mother looks amused. “Don’t get carried away now.”

“I don’t want to jinx anything!” I protest. 

“Wow,” says Mother. “It’s going that well, huh?”

Ugh, trust her to be able to read something into everything. If I just stopped talking now, she’d be able to infer from that too. It’s so frustrating having one mother who’s a lawyer and another who fancies herself able to tell the future. You can’t really keep anything to yourself.

But suddenly, with Mother looking so pleased and supportive about the whole thing, I want to talk about Trow. I don’t have friends to talk to about this stuff, after all. And although I’ve never felt lonely, I do feel full right now—full of things I can’t get out of me. And I can’t get those things out of me by talking to Trow, because they are things about Trow. You can’t exactly say to your quasi-boyfriend-person, Hey, so I think you’re pretty great. What do you think about that? Actually, what I’d like to say to him is, Are you my boyfriend at all? It’s not like we go out on dates or something, because Trow says his home life is too crazy for him to manage that. I feel like it’s super easy to know when you have a boyfriend when you actually get to go out on dates with him.

All of this means that I put my book down and I lean forward, ready to gush. “He’s great,” I say.

“Yeah? So when do we get to meet him?”

“Oh,” I say, “I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it. I mean, his life is kind of crazy…” Even as I say it, as I see the look on Mother’s face, I realize it sounds terrible and lame and awful. Trow’s too busy to meet my mothers? He’s too busy to go out on dates? Suddenly I wonder if Trow is lying to me, what Trow’s proclamations of busyness actually mean. And I’ve never wondered that before, never doubted that before. But I abruptly feel like an idiot for never having thought to question why I can’t be with Trow anywhere but in a deserted classroom at lunchtime.

“Well, I think we should meet him anyway,” Mother says, and she has her serious-lawyer face on, the one that says she’s read too many cases about the terrible things that can happen to girls like me whenever we leave the house. Mother always says it’s only because of Mom’s calming influence that she’s able to let me go out into the world ever on my own.

And she’s probably right. I do like Trow and I actually think my mothers would like him, even if the thought of getting through the initial discussion with Mom about him fills me with dread, because Mom isn’t predictable anymore. I’m sure Trow isn’t lying to me about anything; I’m sure it’s nothing sinister, his busyness. “Yeah,” I say. “I know. His schedule’s tough. He has seven little sisters, can you imagine—”

“The boy,” Mom says from the doorway, startling me.

I look up at her and hesitate but figure the cat’s out of the bag now. “Yeah.”

“The one you thought you might be in trouble with.” Mom moves into my room, staring at me intently. That look on her face is one I don’t like. Why can’t she just look at me like I’m her daughter, instead of like I’m some particularly horrible spill of salt? “The one you were dealing the tarot cards for.”

“Yeah, but he’s not trouble, Mom. He’s—” 

“He has seven sisters,” says Mom.

“Yeah,” I say and smile brightly, because maybe Mom is actually going to express interest.

“Like the constellation,” she says flatly.

“Oh.” I realize: the constellation Pleiades. In Greek mythology, the seven sisters who had been placed in the sky by Zeus. “Yeah, I guess so. I never thought of that before—”

“You must stop seeing him,” Mom interrupts. 

I blink. “He’s not—”

“No. I never liked the idea of you seeing him. Didn’t you see the tarot cards you dealt about him?”

“Yeah,” I say, confused. “They didn’t say much about him at all. They—”

“And now you tell me that he is written in the stars. Do you not see?” She practically shrieks it at me, and her eyes are wild and wide, the whites showing in a frightening fashion. I actually shrink away from her instinctively, terrified.

“Hey—” Mother begins, putting a hand on her arm.

Mom shakes her off. “Do not tell me to calm down. Do you not see what is happening here? Do you not see? Oh, how can you be so blind? How can I have married someone so blind?” Mom turns to me abruptly. “She is blind, she cannot help it, but you should see—”

“Mom.” I try to say it calmly; I try not to let my voice tremble too much. But Mom feels…insane to me. Like she’s come unhinged. I suddenly realize that it’s possible my mom has been walking a tightrope all of her life, between this world and the other world she senses so clearly, and now she’s lost her balance and is plummeting. And I’ve let her walk this tightrope. I’ve encouraged her, telling her that I can see the stars dancing and can deal out tarot cards and can read the lines of spills of salt and pepper. I might have caused this somehow. “Mom, you know that’s not real. He’s not written in the stars. He just happens to have seven sisters—”

Mom tears the book out of my hand and throws it against the opposite wall, where it strikes my mirror. And a single crack shows up there, launching its way across the glass as if in slow motion, creeping with a crinkling noise like the crunching of ice underfoot on a cold day.

I stare at the mirror in shock. So do Mom and Mother. For a moment, there is nothing but complete and utter silence in my bedroom.

And then Mother says, “Okay, it’s okay,” playing automatic peacekeeper as she rolls off of my bed. She takes Mom’s hand. Mom is still staring at the cracked mirror. “It’s okay,” Mother says again.

“What have I done?” demands Mom, white-faced.

“It’s okay,” says Mother, as if by saying it enough times, something magical will happen and she can erase the last few minutes of our lives.

But she can’t erase them. I sit on my bed, staring in shock at the cracked mirror, feeling too numb to even move. Mom got so upset that you’re seeing a boy with seven sisters that she did that, I think to myself. I try to make sense of that in my head, but it makes no sense at all. How can that make sense? It is the opposite of sense.

“It’s okay,” Mother says again, and I can feel that she’s directing that one toward me with a worried glance. We’re in this together, that look seems to say to me. Say that it’s okay.

“It’s okay,” I say automatically, even though I think everything about this is anything but okay. In fact, it’s super not okay, let’s be honest.

“See?” says Mother as she leads Mom from my room. “It’s okay.” Mother closes the door, but I can still hear her murmuring to Mom as they walk down the hall together.

I stay still for a long time, not doing anything. I’m not even thinking. My mind feels blank, wiped clean by everything that happened. Eventually, after a long time, I pull my knees up, wrapping my arms around them and pressing my face against them. I am breathing in short, tight little gasps, although I am not quite crying, and I try to catch oxygen into my lungs, to get a three-part breath going, to find my shanti.

It isn’t working.

Part of me wishes I could call Trow, but he doesn’t have a cell phone. Or so he says. And I can’t even be bothered to tease out whether or not he’s telling me the truth, because the other part of me—the larger part of me at the moment—is thinking that I would gladly never see Trow again if it would help my mom not do that again.


	7. Chapter 7

In the morning, I twist my hair into a thousand different little poking bits all over my head, gazing in the cracked mirror to accomplish it. There is a knock on the door, gentle and hesitant, and I take a deep breath and call, “Come in!”

Mom opens the door. She is holding a plate on which rest two pieces of the special free-of-everything-that-might- possibly-harm-you bread she buys, toasted and slathered with jelly. For my mom to put jelly on her special bread means that this is a peace offering of the most major kind she can muster. “Hi,” she says and smiles brightly, and I can tell she wants to pretend that nothing happened last night.

I look at the mirror, whose crack definitively says otherwise. But all I say in response is, “Hi.” I want her to feel better. I want her to be better.

“Made you toast,” she says unnecessarily and puts the plate on my dresser.

“Thanks,” I say, and then, to make her happy, I take a huge bite, even though I’m not the least bit hungry.

“I thought you might want to teach the lunchtime meditation class,” she offers. “I know you love that class.”

I stare at her. And then I say, “What?"

“You’re the best meditator I’ve ever seen,” she says and gives me a proud, beaming smile.

“Right,” I say, too confused to even care about that. “Sure. But I can’t teach the lunchtime meditation class.”

“Why not?” she says, her face falling.

I feel like one of us is going insane, and actually it’s possible it could be me, because nothing would surprise me right now. “Because I’ll be in school,” I point out very carefully.

Her face immediately hardens. “You’re not going to school.” 

“I…” I don’t know what to make of this. “Okay. Why?” 

“Because school is where you see him,” she spits at me.

I stare at her in disbelief. “Mom,” I manage, “I don’t understand what he did to you that—”

“I don’t understand what you don’t understand!” she shouts at me. “I have worked so hard to keep you safe, and now you are really going to walk right into the danger?”

I am bewildered. “What danger? Mom, he’s perfectly safe. We never even leave the school; we’re surrounded by supervision at all times. What do you really think he could do to me in that situation?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what he could do to you! All the things that the stars have been saying!”

“Mom, the stars don’t ‘say’ anything!” I yell, growing frustrated. “They’re just stars.”

“I know you don’t believe that. I know you’ve seen them dancing.”

I have. It’s true. I can’t deny that. “But, Mom, that doesn’t mean anything. That’s just feelings. That’s not the future. Nothing can really tell us the future; isn’t that what you always say? Because there are too many variables? And the stars haven’t been making sense for me for a while now. They’re not saying anything.”

“They’re saying everything. And every step you take down this path has them saying less and less, until there will be one constellation left, and it cannot be. All the variables will disappear, and the stars will have one thing to say, over and over and over and over.”

“Mom,” I plead, terrified by how little sense she is making, “please, listen to me. It doesn’t—”

“You need to listen to me. Because you don’t understand, and I do.”

“You understand what the stars are saying?”

“I always have. It has always been my talent, always been my way. But you are the one who will really see, and I cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.”

“Mom—”

“You’re not going to school,” she says, and then she marches out of my room and slams the door shut.

This is ridiculous, I think. I walk over to the door, calling for her, and I close my hand over the doorknob…and it doesn’t move. Th door is…locked. But that’s impossible. This door doesn’t have a lock. It’s never had a lock. I jiggle the doorknob, astonished, but it is clear to me that somehow, someway, my mom has managed to lock the door.

What the hell?

“Mom!” I shout, fighting with the doorknob. “Let me out!” There is no response, so I bang on the door, bringing the flat of my hand down on it. “Mom! Seriously, let me out!” Nothing. I make a frustrated noise and say, “I’ll stop seeing him, okay? If it makes you that unhappy, I’ll stop seeing him at lunchtime. That’s all it was, anyway. It was just lunchtime with him. It wasn’t anything major. So you don’t need to be nervous about this. You don’t need to be overreacting. I’ll…” I can hear nothing beyond the door, certainly not my mother responding to my entreaties in any way. “Damn it,” I mutter, and slide down to the floor with my back against the door.

She has locked an unlockable door. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

***

My mom thinks I’m the best at meditating, but it’s completely failing me this morning. First I call Mother, because surely she will come and save me from this insanity. But she doesn’t pick up her phone. Figures. She must be in court. I call her office, and the receptionist just says, “She’s not in. Can I take a message?” I want to demand details, but they seldom give details because of confidentiality issues and I’m sure they’re not going to be convinced I should be told secret client information because I’ve been locked in my bedroom. I make a noise of frustration and say, “Can you tell her to call Merrow when she gets in?”

Then I sit in my room and stare at my cracked mirror. I wish Trow had a cell phone. I wish I had other friends I could call for help. This is probably why people have friends, isn’t it? So that they can call for help if they get locked up by their suddenly irrational moms? For the first time, I feel a real kinship with all those people at school I hear complaining about their parents. If their parents are behaving like this all the time, no wonder they’re so frustrated and annoyed.

I try to call for Mom again, but there is still no answer. Why is she so incredibly good at being stubborn right now? I wonder suddenly if she left for yoga and peer out my window, but I can’t quite get the right angle to see the street where she parked her car. Still feeling helpless, I sit on my bed and try to focus on a three-part breath. I try to empty my lungs and with them my mind, but it’s not working; my brain keeps circling stubbornly around its sense of panic. I at least wish it were night so I could read the stars. That might make me feel a little calmer, more in control. The stars’ dance is ancient to me, ageless, has kept me company for longer than I can remember. But I don’t have stars or tarot cards or salt—none of the things I’ve been taught to use to give me a false feeling of control over my future.

Hours tick by, and finally I decide this is weird. I mean, not that it’s ever been normal, but this is even weirder. Hours she’s left me up here, no contact at all, not even a question about whether or not I want lunch. Is she just going to starve me?

I try the door again. Still locked. It just doesn’t make sense. My mom is so easygoing, so calm and centered and shanti. She must have really lost her mind. Not as some kind of figure of speech like people use all the time. She must have really lost her mind.

I blink away tears. Now is not the time to start crying over this. Now is the time to start planning a course of action. And I’m the one who has to do it. I don’t have anything around me to even pretend to tell me how to do it. I sit on my window seat and consider things logically. Other people come up with plans all the time. Plans that work. I ignore my personal history of failed military tactics and tell myself that this time I can come up with something effective that will work.

The first thing I do, of course, is think about Mother, because it would be preferable if she could come up with the plan. She hasn’t called me back yet. She must be really busy, and I probably didn’t leave an urgent enough message to get my point across. That’s my fault, I know. I call her cell and get voice mail again. I call her office again. Still not in. I leave another message. Then I make a noise of frustration and resist the urge to throw the phone out the window. That’s not going to help at all.

But I pause now, thinking. Out the window.

I’ve never escaped out my bedroom window before. Then again, I’ve never had to. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I push open my window and my screen, and I consider. The tree is right there, and it looks sturdy enough. I am by no means a tree expert. In fact, I have never climbed one before, ever. But other people manage to do it all the time, I think. Well. In books and movies they do. I think.

It seems a little bit reckless and a little bit overdramatic to climb out of my bedroom window, onto a tree branch, and down to the ground. But what the hell—my mom started it. She’s the one being reckless and overdramatic. If I fall and break my leg, it’ll be her fault. And I don’t think it would be anything worse than a broken leg. I glance at the distance to the ground. Hopefully. If I fall, I’ll just have to tuck and roll. That’s what they say to do if you jump out of a moving car, right? And surely this would be similar.

Or is tuck and roll what they used to tell people to do in the event of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War?

Never mind. Too much thinking. I pull on an extra fleece against the nippy air and edge my way out onto the tree branch. It doesn’t break. I don’t plummet to my death. Good sign, I decide, and take a three-part breath and keep going.

It feels like it takes me forever to make it down to the ground, but eventually I get there. Well, I tumble softly down onto it, but let’s pretend that it was a super graceful exercise and that I’m a natural at climbing trees. I am dusty and my hands are scraped up, but I’m all in one piece.

I consider what to do now and decide to escape before I can attract Mom’s attention and further ire. I’ll go to Mother’s office, and I’ll just wait there until she shows up, and then she and I can handle all of this together.

*** 

It is colder outside than I had anticipated. The fleece helps, but the air still bites sharply into me as I cross the river through the middle of the city into Providence’s financial center. The city is small, luckily, and the entire walk takes me only about twenty minutes.

I’ve only been to Mother’s office a couple of times before and only gone inside once. Usually we just wait for her to duck out, so that we can get to some event somewhere that we are inevitably late for since we’re always running late because Mom says that she doesn’t keep the right kind of time here. Anyway, Mother says she likes to keep her work and home separated, and so for that reason, the receptionist has no idea who I am when I show up there. She smiles at me politely, but I feel like I can sense her faint judgment: Why isn’t this teenager in school? And what is she doing at a law office?

I ask after my mother, and the response I get it is what I’d been getting on the phone.

“She isn’t in. Can I take a message?”

“No,” I say and try not to sound like I’m desperate. I take a deep breath and try to sound composed and perfectly normal and not like someone who just snuck out her window and then climbed a tree to get down. “I’ve been calling her. I really need to talk to her. I’ll just wait for her to get back.”

“You can’t just sit here all day,” says the receptionist. 

“Why not?” I challenge her, because I’m starting to lose my patience now. I just want to talk to my mother and have her take some of this responsibility.

“Because this is a law office.”

“Right, and this is a waiting room, so I’m just going to wait.” I see her look up at my rainbow-colored hair, and I frown, annoyed at being judged like that. “I’m not going to cause any problems.”

“Perhaps if you could tell me what this is about, one of the other lawyers could see you.”

“It’s personal,” I say primly. “I just need to talk to my mother, whenever she gets back.”

“Your mother.” The receptionist blinks at me, and I can see her trying to resolve the way I look with the way my mother looks. And I don’t just mean the fact that my mother is Latina.

“I’m adopted,” I say, which I find generally makes people accept pretty much everything.

“But your mother’s not here—”

“I know. I’m just going to wait—”

“No, she never came in today. She didn’t call, and that’s not like her, but we assumed she was sick and stayed home or something. We haven’t been able to get her to answer her cell phone. Did you check for her at home?”

I stare at the receptionist, and it’s as if someone’s opened a door somewhere and a cold, brisk wind has staggered its way in. I feel it slam into me icily, unapologetically. How can my mother not be here? Is my mother at home? And if my mother is at home, why didn’t she intervene in the complete insanity that was going on this morning?

I don’t tell the receptionist any of this. I instinctively hold it in. I don’t know what will happen if I tell her. I’m so terrified that my mind won’t think beyond Pretend nothing is wrong and get out of this office.

I back slowly away from the desk, saying, “Home. Okay. I’ll try her there.”

The receptionist watches me with a combination of concern and confusion. I try a stupid little wave, feeling like an idiot, and walk out of the office and over to the elevator. I press the button and wait for it and look around me, feeling like I’m being watched, like everyone is looking at me, knowing that I am having the craziest, scariest day.

The elevator comes with a ding that is echoed by bells chiming elsewhere in the building. I hear them distantly, from a long way off, and they transfix me for a second. I stand suspended in the act of crossing the threshold into the elevator, and I look around me for the little bells that I can hear, momentarily forgetting Mom and Mother and every other thing that has happened.

I shake my head, realizing suddenly that I have been standing in front of the elevator door long enough for it to be buzzing angrily at me because I’m preventing it from closing. How long has that been going on? I step into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor and try not to feel like I might be going crazy.


	8. Chapter 8

Once on the street, I consider my next move. I am still trying to make myself be calm, shying away from anything terrible. I am overreacting to all of this, I tell myself.  
This isn’t as strange as it seems.

I walk to Mom’s yoga studio, doing three-part breaths the whole way, emptying my mind, letting all of my worried thoughts fly away. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get to the yoga studio, but I don’t let myself think about it. Making a plan would be acknowledging that there are terrifying things happening that I need a plan to deal with, and I can’t acknowledge that. It’s possible this is why I’m so bad at plans.

When I get to the yoga studio, it’s dark and shuttered. There isn’t even a sign explaining this unexpected closure. There’s just no one there.

And this makes total sense. I had no evidence Mom went to work today. Mother didn’t even go to work today. Everyone just went crazy and locked me in an unlockable room and ignored my pleas for help. And I had walked to the yoga studio thinking I would get there and Mom would be there and…and what? I’d, like, just offer to teach a class or something? Like somehow it would turn out that this entire situation was just a horrible, terrible…dream? Hallucination? Something not real.

Good plan, Merrow, I mock myself. Really super terrific plan. I press myself against the door of the yoga studio and breathe raggedly and tell myself not to fall apart. What good would that do anyone?

A man walking by peers at me and says, “Are you okay?” 

“Fine,” I snap quickly and make myself start walking away, looking down and hunching my shoulders so as not to invite further inquiry.

I feel like the man is watching me go. I feel like everyone around me is watching me. I feel like the world is flickering at the corner of my vision, like if I’m not careful, I’ll fall sideways into the world with the dancing stars, a world that had not prepared me for this and seems suddenly more sensible than anything going on here. I feel almost dizzy, everything around me tipping and tilting, and I do the only thing I can think of to do: I run.

***

I find myself at the high school without ever having made a conscious decision to go there. I dash up to the building and stop and double over, clutching at a stitch in my side, gasping for breath.

And then I stop to consider. I can’t just walk into the building. And say what? I wish my mom had left me with the tarot cards. I could have dealt them to see if they would magically tell me what I am supposed to say or do here. What good is telling me I can tell the future if I’m still able to end up in this situation?

I push back at the anger and do some three-part breaths, because I need to keep it together, damn it. Trow, I think. Maybe I can find Trow, and maybe he’ll know what to do. Even if he doesn’t know what to do, I am suddenly desperate to see someone who is part of the life that I had. I need to find Trow, and I need to have him be normal, unlike everyone else that I love right now.

I look at my watch and figure out what class Trow would be in. One of the first floor classrooms, luckily, and I creep up to the windows, staying ducked underneath them. I’m going to have to become visible in order to see into the room. And hopefully Trow will be there. What if it’s one of those days when Trow isn’t there? What am I going to do then?

I refuse to let myself contemplate that. Trow is going to be there and it’s going to be normal, I tell myself. Shanti, shanti, shanti. And then I take a deep breath and peek up over into the window.

Trow is sitting right there, and he happens to be looking right at me, and I could cry at my suddenly excellent luck. I so need that after the rest of today.

Trow blinks at me, surprised to see me, and tilts his head in confusion, lifting an eloquent eyebrow at me.

I manage not to burst into tears, and I beckon him and then duck back underneath the windows and move over toward the front entrance of the school, keeping to the hedges.

It feels like it takes forever for Trow to emerge, but maybe it’s just a couple of minutes. I’ve lost all sense of time. I feel like this day has been my entire lifetime.  
When he finally walks outside, I lose my meager grasp on my composure. I fly to him and he catches me up, and then I am sobbing into the lapel of his coat and clutching at him desperately.

“Okay,” he says to me soothingly. “Shh, shh, shh. What’s wrong?”

I try to tell him, but I’m practically hyperventilating with sobs.

“Merrow,” he says gently and nudges me away from him just as gently. “Three-part breath, Merrow, right? Let’s try one.”

He walks me through one and then another, and I look up at him and he is smiling so sweetly. He lifts his hands up and wipes at the tears on my cheeks with his thumbs. Which just makes me start crying again. Trow is better than just normal; Trow is lovely. Not that he isn’t normally lovely—he’s just extra super lovely right now.

“Okay, Merrow, tell me what’s wrong.”

I lick my lips and I swallow and I don’t even try a three-part breath because I’m never going to get it in. I just blurt out, “I think my mom’s gone insane.”

Trow doesn’t even look surprised. “What do you mean?”   
“She went crazy over…over you,” I admit. I hadn’t thought through having to break that part to him. “And I don’t mean just, you know, normal overprotective mom stuff that might make sense if I had an overprotective mom. She wouldn’t let me go to school today because I’d see you here. As if I was just never going to go to school again. She’s completely irrational about you.”

Trow doesn’t seem to know what to make of this. “Would it help if she met me?”

He’s not understanding. He’s thinking this is just disapproving mom stuff. “No, Trow, it’s super beyond that now. She locked me in my room.”

“To keep you from going to school?” Trow sounds incredulous. “Does she do that a lot?”

“Trow.” I take a deep breath. “My bedroom door doesn’t have a lock.”

He stares at me. “Then, Merrow, how could she—” 

“It gets worse.”

“It gets worse than you telling me that you’ve spent all morning locked in a room that doesn’t have a lock?”

“I climbed my tree to get out, and I went to find my mother because I thought maybe she could talk some sense into my mom, and my mother never went to work today. Trow, what if my mom has her locked in the house too? What if my mom has completely snapped? What am I going to do if—I mean, she’s my mom and I need her to—I can’t—”

“Merrow, take a deep breath. Just one, even. Doesn’t need to be three-part. You’re not breathing.”

“For obvious reasons,” I shout at him, struggling to follow his directions.

“I’m not arguing with you there,” he says grimly, reaching out and rubbing his hands along my upper arms and shoulders. It warms me up and feels soothing and comforting. “We should call the police.”

“And say what? She hasn’t committed a crime. She just…” I refuse to harbor the possibility that my mom has done anything more severe than locked us into rooms. I just… “Trow, we can’t. Please. Please can you just come with me and we’ll just…see? Before we get the police involved? Please, Trow, I…” I trail off realizing I’m not breathing again, and I focus on that.

Trow’s gaze on me is pitying, and I hate to see that. He thinks I’ve lost it too. He thinks I’m being delusional. I look away from him, at the school, marveling that we’ve been just standing right outside it having this intense conversation. After a second, Trow says, “Okay. Let’s go.”

*** 

Trow holds my hand the whole walk back to my house, and I am grateful for the contact. He doesn’t talk to me, which I am also grateful for. I can’t handle talking right now. I keep trying to do three-part breaths, but I can’t clear my mind. It is a cacophony of panic.

My house looks utterly, perfectly normal from the outside. And both Mom’s and Mother’s cars are parked on the street in front of it. I didn’t notice when I fled earlier. I stand with my hand curled into Trow’s and look from their cars to our house, quiet and cheerful. Except for the fact that our curtains are drawn. We never draw the curtains during the day—Mom likes the brightness in the house.

I swallow and, as if we are perfectly attuned, we both begin walking up the walk together. When we reach the two shallow steps that lead to the front door, we also both pause at the same time. There’s a…buzzing feeling, like static electricity, and underneath it, a sound almost like bone-deep sorrowful wailing, and then, farther underneath that, bells, like I heard in Mother’s office.

I really am going completely insane. It’s terrifying. Except that Trow says, his voice low, “What is that?” 

“You feel it too?” I say, relieved beyond words.

“And hear it. Where are the bells coming from? And is someone crying?” It’s Trow who steps forward, going to open the door to my house.

At the same moment that I realize I don’t have a key, the door swings open under Trow’s hand. Maybe that shouldn’t be unsettling, given that both of my mothers appear to be home, but I shudder nonetheless.

I join him in the doorway and peek my head past him. “Merrow,” he begins, turning as if to shield me, but I push him away and step into the living room.

The living room is a mess. A disaster area. All of the furniture has been turned upside down, all of the books and photos and knickknacks scattered about. The pictures on the walls have been pulled off and smashed. My shoes crunch on the pieces of them as I walk farther into the room. The room is such a disaster that even the ceiling has been attacked, plaster dust raining down on me as I stand there, drinking it all in. There is even wallpaper peeling from the walls around me. What the stars happened in here?

And on one of the walls, the one over the couch where a watercolor of a pretty, fuzzy landscape had once been, painted in glowing silver are the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

“Is it your birthday?” Trow asks me, confused. “Or one of your moms?”

“No, my birthday is June 21,” I say dazedly, staring at the message.

“The summer solstice,” says Trow. 

“What?” I blink away from the message. 

“The summer solstice.”

Why is he talking to me about this? I turn away from him and shout for my mothers, getting no answer. I don’t understand what this is. I don’t understand what could have happened. I walk swiftly through the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, all of which are a mess, all of which are empty and silent. The static buzzing and the wailing bells no longer haunt me here in the house. Or maybe I’m just too busy freaking out over everything else that’s going on right now.

I take the stairs two at a time, still shouting for my mothers. I go right past my room, into their bedroom. It too has been destroyed, and scattered all over it like snowflakes are my mom’s tarot cards. I find myself on my hands and knees, pulling them all together, shuffling them, dealing them.

“Merrow,” Trow says to me carefully, as if he doesn’t want to disturb me but feels like he has to.

I shake my head, dealing the cards again. “But it doesn’t mean anything! I keep dealing the cards, but I don’t understand the reading! Were they telling me this and I didn’t understand it?” Annoyed, I fling the cards away from me. They spiral out, fluttering down to the carpet, and I sit there, exhausted and frustrated. “Where can they be?”

“We should call the police now.” 

“And say what?”

“That your mothers are missing. That it looks like they were kidnapped.”

“I don’t understand. When did this happen? How could I not have heard it?”

“Maybe it happened after you left,” suggests Trow.

So all morning I sat locked in my unlockable room, my mothers deaf to my entreaties. I climbed out the window to the tree, and then after I fled, someone came and kidnapped them. Who? How?

“But how did this whole mess happen?” I ask, bewildered. 

“They put up a fight?” guesses Trow.

“A fight? This is not just a fight—this is a war. Trow, the ceiling is coming down.” I gesture above us, where dusty plaster is raining down on us from gouges in the ceiling.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I just don’t feel like we should call the police.” Everything around me is fuzzy and out of focus, but that particular detail seems clear—whatever is going on here, the police can’t help. I don’t know how I know that—I just know. Better than I’ve ever known anything from the stars or cards or spices or dust.  
I stand up wearily and walk down the hallway and pause at my door. I reach out to open it, but the doorknob jiggles uselessly, just the way it did when I was on the other side of it. “Still locked,” I say glumly.

“Merrow, we’ve got to tell—”

“Shh.” I launch forward suddenly, clapping my hand over his mouth. He looks at me in alarm. “There’s someone in the house,” I hiss.

He lifts his eyebrows and moves my hand away from his mouth. “You heard something?” he asks, his voice barely a whisper.

“No,” I whisper back, licking my lips. “I just know that someone’s in the house. Or…outside of the house.”

“What?” Trow sounds even more confused.

But I can’t explain it. I feel like it came to me in a flash: a man, older, in corduroy pants and a button-down shirt, standing on my front walk. As vivid as a memory. And maybe it is a memory. Is it a memory? I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before, and I don’t know why it’s happening now, and I’m not even sure what it is, but I feel like there’s someone here. I feel like I know this as well as I know my name. I feel like it is the only thing that I know.

I push past Trow and almost fall down the stairs in my haste to get to the front door.

Then I pull the door open, and there he is, just as I remembered him. Or…predicted him? I think of the future Mom was always telling me to try to see, the stars dancing overhead, the tarot cards, the salt and pepper and sneezing. All of that nonsense, and suddenly for the first time, I feel like I understand it. This flash of intuition makes sense to me the way nothing else has in my life: there is a man outside my house, in the past or the present or the future—it doesn’t matter. I almost don’t understand why Trow doesn’t see how much it doesn’t matter.

“Hello, Merrow,” says the man, and smiles at me.

I stare at him. I can feel Trow behind me, the heat from his body protective and reassuring.

“Do you know this man?” he asks, pitching his voice low so that only I can hear him.

I’ve never seen him before in my life. But it doesn’t matter. Because I’ve seen him before in my future.

I step forward, toward him. “Who are you?” I ask, trying to sound assured and confident.

“Asking for names already. You’re quite prepared to get down to business, aren’t you?”

None of that was his name. “Who are you?” I ask again, and I actually no longer feel uncertain. The confidence in me is innate and strong. This has happened before, and it will happen again. All of the threads of time, running concurrently, have suddenly converged, and I feel like I can touch all of them.

“It’s a long story. Won’t you come with me?”

I’m ready to follow him. In fact, I walk down the first step and Trow pulls me back.

“Why?” Trow asks.

“Aren’t you looking for the—” The man pauses. “People who live here?”

My mothers. I turn to Trow, frantic. “He knows where my mothers are.”

“Yes,” Trow agrees, frowning at me. “And don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

“It is what is. Or what was supposed. Or what was thought. That’s the dance the stars have chosen. Finally.”

“Merrow, you’re not making sense.” Trow’s frown flickers into concern. He actually lays a hand on my forehead as if I’m running a fever.

“Yes, I am,” I insist. “I’m making sense the way I’ve never made sense before. Everything is making sense. Finally. Can’t you feel it?” I take his hand in mine, wishing I could help him see the way all of the dances of the stars are overlapping each other in my mind’s eye, and I know exactly which constellation of them to flit over.

“Merrow, your mothers are missing, your house has been destroyed, and a man you’ve never seen before has just shown up claiming to know where they are. And you want to go with him.”

“I know,” I agree. “It makes no sense.”

“Right,” says Trow, relieved. “That’s what I’m trying to—” 

“And that’s why it finally makes sense. Finally. All of it. Finally.” I am oddly, contradictorily happy. I feel like I can take a nice, deep breath for the first time in my life. This insane day has clicked into sense, and I can’t explain it beyond that, just that it feels right. Once I had the flu and skipped yoga for several weeks, recovering. After the first class I took upon my return, I realized that I could turn my neck over my shoulder so much farther than I had been able to before the class—but I had never noticed until that moment that my neck had been tense. I feel a little like that now, like I have come home to the way I am supposed to be and I never realized before exactly how ill-fitting this world had been.

I turn to the man on the walk, ignoring Trow’s continued sputter of protest, because there’s only one thing missing here. “Where are my mothers?”

The man smiles at me, and I trust him implicitly, because we have done this before, he and I, in one of the dances of the stars; I had just forgotten. “This way,” he says and begins walking, and I follow him.

Trow, reluctance in every movement, falls into step beside me


	9. Chapter 9

The man talks as we walk through the winding streets of the East Side. The early winter twilight is falling, darkness stealing its way up the hill and through the alleyways, filling in the gaps of the trees’ empty branches. I sense the bright glow of the stars over my head, but I don’t look up. I am focused on going to my mothers.

“I did the best I could,” the man says.

I had not been cold, basking in the warmth of the stars overhead and the world clicking into sense and my mothers coming closer to me, but everything retracts somewhat, retreats at his words, and the cold of the air around me seeps through. “What do you mean?”

“It was too late by the time I got here. Your mother sent the word too late. Stubborn and in denial—you who read the prophecies, you are the best at denial. But I suppose maybe you have to be, or the weight of the possibilities—of the futures that could be—would keep you from ever locating the here and now.”

Objectively, I feel like nothing he is saying should make sense. And it doesn’t really. And yet like everything else since I wandered through my devastated house, it makes the most perfect kind of sense.

“By the time I got to them, the Seelies had done… Well, you’ll see.”

I don’t like the cryptic foreboding of this.

“Who are the Seelies?” Trow asks. “Are they a gang?”

The man spares him a brief look. “Where did you get the hanger-on?”

I bristle on Trow’s behalf. “This is Trow.”

“You shouldn’t tell me his name, my dear. It is both the most important thing about him and the least important, since I don’t care. We have this well in hand, Trow. You can go now.”

Trow flinches at the dismissal and says, “I’m not leaving her with you. I have no idea who you are. Neither does she. I have no idea what is going on. Neither does she. I think we should call the police.”

“What would the police do with an Otherworld uprising? They lack jurisdiction.”

“You’re not making sense,” Trow says between gritted teeth. 

“Trow, it’s all right,” I tell him, taking his hand to try to comfort him.

“No, it’s not. Who are you?” Trow demands of the man.

The man pauses, drawing himself up to his full height and looking at Trow down his nose, even though, at his full height, Trow probably has at least an inch on him. “Roger Williams,” he answers.

“Oh, come on,” says Trow.

The man shrugs and resumes walking.

Trow uses his hand in mine to pull me in the opposite direction. “Come on,” he says. “We’re going.”

“No, we’re not. I have to find my mothers—”

“Roger Williams, Merrow? The man who founded Rhode Island? And died in the seventeenth century? That’s who’s taking you to your mothers?”

“It’s not exactly an unusual name,” I manage.

But then the man says over his shoulder, not pausing in his strides, “But he’s right. I did found this place.”

Trow looks positively thunderous at that. “See?” he says. 

“Wait.” I let go of Trow’s hand and run to catch up with the man. I hear Trow swear under his breath and catch up to me. “You can’t be that Roger Williams.”

“Why not? Did you know him?”

“No. I can’t know him. That’s the thing. He died centuries ago.”

“That is a rude thing to say to me,” replies the man haughtily, as if he really is offended, “seeing as how I am standing right here.”

“You’re dead,” Trow says flatly.

“What makes you think I’m dead?” asks the man mildly. “The fact that you lived four hundred years ago,” answers Trow. 

“If I died, where’s my body?”

“What?”

“Where’s my body? Really, you’ll do anything to excuse the evidence of your own eyes. You think everyone has to die, so you think I must have died, even though no one has ever located my body. I founded this ridiculous place, created it out of nothing but some apple trees from Avalon, and you think that no one would have bothered to keep track of my final resting place?”

“They must know,” Trow says vaguely, but I am thinking how I have never heard of where Roger Williams is buried.

“There was an old wives’ tale that I was buried in a certain corner of a certain plot of land here in Providence. They dug ‘me’ up, and do you know what they found?” He glances over at us.

Trow and I both shake our heads.

“The root of an apple tree. And then they said that was me.” 

“They said what?” I say.

“They said the apple tree ate my body.” 

“Do apple trees eat bodies?” I ask.

“You are finally asking the right question. But I expect nothing less. It’s the talent of those who read prophecies, to ask the right questions.”

“So you’re Roger Williams and you never died,” says Trow sarcastically. “Why didn’t you die?”

“Because I’m a good wizard, and a good wizard should be clever enough to avoid that nonsense. Here we are.” He has come to a stop in front of an old Colonial house, like any number of other old Colonial houses on the East Side.

I look at it. “This is where my mothers are?”

“Yes. It was the closest house of power I could think of to bring them. Poe used to live here, you know. He wove the power of his words into the walls. Unfortunately, they’re not exactly soothing words, but that’s how Poe was. Couldn’t get him to stop being melodramatic and fatalistic for two minutes put together.”

“Poe?” echoes Trow.

“Edgar Allan Poe,” Roger Williams clarifies impatiently. “What do they teach you in school these days?”

“They teach us science, as in living organisms die.”

Roger Williams gives him a scathing look. “You think science isn’t magic?” he says.

Which, honestly, makes the most sense of anything I’ve thought of yet.

Roger Williams turns to me, looking almost gentle. He has kind brown eyes. It’s nice when the founder of your state turns out to be a nice guy. “What has your mother told you about home?”

This gives me pause. “Home?” 

“The Otherworld.”

“The other world,” I echo. “Home.” Aside from a few mentions here and there, she hasn’t really told me much about it, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s always felt like home to me, this mysterious other world she used to talk about, and now here is confirmation that it is.

From a man who should have died four hundred years ago, but really, complaining about that would be a little bit like killing the messenger. 

Kind of.

“And has she told you about the Seelies?” Roger Williams continues.

“The who?”

“Oh dear.” He looks concerned now. He glances toward the house and back to me. “This is… Perhaps I should…”

“Where are they?” I demand. “Are they in there? I want to see them.”

“Merrow, you have to know that—”

I ignore him. Now that I am so close to my mothers, I need to see them, make sure they’re all right.

I march right up to the door and into the house.

My mothers are anything but all right. Mother is lying on the couch in the living room, as still as death. And Mom is sitting on the floor beside the couch, curled into a tiny ball, wailing.


	10. Chapter 10

After my first stunned moment of reaction, when I just stand there staring unhelpfully, I force myself into the room. “Mom,” I say and fall to my knees next to her. “Mom,” I repeat, trying to break into the little world of her own that she is clearly lost in.

“Use her name, Merrow,” says Roger Williams behind me. So I do, and that does make Mom look up. She stops wailing, shivering uncontrollably instead, and she stares at me, not recognizing me.

I have never imagined what it would be like to sit in front of my mom and have her look straight at me and have no idea who I am. It is horrific. No, that isn’t the right word. There is no right word for how wrong this situation is.

“Mom, it’s me,” I say carefully, tenderly. “It’s Merrow.”

The name seems to jar her at least. “Merrow,” she repeats and then reaches a hand out to feel me, as if I have changed since she last saw me. “Merrow,” she says again, and then pulls me in for a hug. “The leaves are falling,” she chatters into my ear. “The sun catches them as they fall.”

“Mom, what are you talking about? What’s wrong with Mother?”

“This world,” says Mom, and lets go of me to curl back into her ball. “Oh, this world.”

I reach out to touch Mother. I’m worried she’s going to be cold, but she is warm to my touch, and I can see now that she’s breathing. I want to reach out and shake her, wake her up, but I can also tell that it would be utterly fruitless to do it. I know it without knowing how I know it. I feel like I know so much now without knowing how, and yet it is nothing compared to how much I still don’t know.

I look at Roger Williams, and I say firmly, “You need to tell me what happened.”

*** 

Roger Williams takes us to the back of the house, where there is a small, dark kitchen.

“Tea?” he asks hopefully.

I shake my head and look at Trow. “You don’t have to stay.” 

He gives me a look. “Merrow. Of course I have to stay.”

“I know, but—but—” I stop, trying to wrap my mind around what’s happening, so that I can coherently explain to Trow why I’m fine and he should go home.

“I’m staying, Merrow. Don’t be so completely absurd as to suggest that I leave you now, with everything, alone with Roger Williams.” Trow glares at Roger Williams as he says it.

So I turn to him too. And I say, “I want to know, right now, what’s wrong with my mother and my mom.”

Roger Williams looks across at me evenly. “Your mother didn’t tell you anything,” he concludes finally, heavily.

I consider. “She told me that I could see the stars dancing, that I could read things in tarot cards, dust motes, cinnamon and sugar, and salt and pepper, coughs and sneezes.”

He smiles faintly across at me. “And can you?”

“Yes. No. I mean, I don’t know.” I pause in frustration, wondering how to find the right words. “Sometimes I feel like I understand what she’s saying to me, but then again, sometimes I feel like I have no idea what she means. I mean, I never know what they’re saying to me. It’s just feelings. When it’s anything at all.”

“I daresay you will know now,” says Roger Williams with finality. “As much as anyone ever knows.”

I don’t contradict him, because I don’t actually care about the stupid stars at the moment. “How do I fix Mom and Mother?”

“My dear, we must start at the beginning,” he says. “First things first: you are a faerie.”

I blink. Great, I think. This guy really is insane. I guess him saying he was Roger Williams should have been my first clue… “I’m a what?”

“A faerie.”

I look behind me, suddenly thinking maybe I’ve sprouted wings. I haven’t (which is, frankly, a little bit disappointing).

Trow says, “This is ridiculous—”

“If you are going to belittle the truth after requesting it,” cuts in Roger Williams icily, “you are welcome to leave.”

Trow falls silent, but he doesn’t look pleased about it. 

“A faerie,” I say flatly. “You think I’m a faerie.”

“I know you are one.”

“A faerie. What do you even mean by that?”

“You’re not from the Thisworld. You’re from the Otherworld. Where such things exist. Faeries and ogres and gnomes.”

The Otherworld. I think of my mom’s yoga studio. I think of her constant references to the other world, the world not our own, but the world where we were more at home, the world where we really belonged. All this time, I thought it was metaphorical. But now, out of nowhere, a man claiming to be Roger Williams is using the same exact term in the same exact way. The Otherworld. As if it’s a real place.

“Faeries and ogres and gnomes and people who found states,” drawls Trow sarcastically. He clearly doesn’t believe anything Roger is saying, but my head is whirling around that single phrase. The Otherworld.

“I am a wizard,” Roger informs him primly. “But I am not from the Otherworld. We wizards bridge both worlds. So do most other creatures these days, but in the beginning there were us and the Threaders, but the Threaders were the elite. Not just the workaday wizard, trying to get into a golden Otherworld. Those were good days…”

He is looking into the distance, and I can tell he is remembering a time and a place far away from ours.

And I don’t have time for that. I have much more pressing, here-and-now problems. “But what does this have to do with my mothers?”

“Well, your mother is a faerie too, of course. I mean, your real mother. Not the one laying down in there.”

“Mom, not Mother,” I clarify. Of my two mothers, it’s got to be Mom who’s the faerie.

“Merrow, you don’t really believe this is true?” Trow cuts in.

I look at him. “Mom talks about the Otherworld. She…I don’t know, do you have another explanation?”

“Yeah, I—” I watch as Trow’s eyes run through all of the other possible explanations and come up empty. He looks at Roger, then back at me. “But, Merrow—”

“Tell me what I have to do for my mothers,” I demand of Roger.

“Neither one of those beings in the other room is your mother. Your mother is a Seelie faerie.”

I stare at him. “A…what?” 

“A royal faerie.”

“My mother is a royal faerie?” I echo. 

He nods.

“My mom’s not my mother?” My voice is so faint I can barely hear it.

He shakes his head.

I swallow, trying to keep my thoughts organized. “Then…how did I end up with Mom?”

“Ah, that’s where things get complicated.” 

“That’s where things get complicated?” I exclaim.

“There was a prophecy. Four faeries of Seelie blood, born of the turning of the seasons, would destroy the tyrannical reign of the Seelie Court and bring longed-for peace back to the Otherworld. And you are one of them.”

“I’m ‘one of them’?” My feeling that things were going to start making sense went out the window long ago, but this particular assertion by Roger is taking the cake for me. “I’m a…special faerie…who’s going to…bring peace?” Because I’m clearly not. I’m Merrow Rodriguez-Chance, and I have two mothers, and they need my help. I don’t care about this Seelie Court thing.

“Along with three other faeries, yes.”

“Three other faeries. I don’t know three other faeries.” 

He gives me a knowing look. “Don’t you?”

I want to scream in frustration. What the stars is he talking about? “What does this have to do with my mothers?”

“That is what happened to your mothers—the Seelie Court, finding where you were hidden and coming after you.”

I think of the destroyed house. “So they fought. My mothers fought.”

“Of course they fought. They fought for you. They fought to delay the prophecy. As if the future can be pushed back. As if time can be stopped. None of us—not even me—have ever accomplished that. Time, at whatever pace it decides to move, always keeps moving forward. There’s no choice. We may pick and choose which constellations to read, but we cannot stop the fact that they do dance. So the prophecy has begun.”

“How? Why? Why now?” I ask desperately. I had this somewhat, kind of normal-ish life, and I don’t understand why I don’t have it anymore.

“Did you tell someone your birth date?” Roger Williams asks me knowingly.

And what does that have to do with anything? “What?” 

“You did,” Trow contributes quietly. “You told me: the summer solstice.”

So? I don’t understand why that’s important. “Only because today’s not my birthday.” I look at Roger Williams, quizzical and confused. “I only said it because today is not my birthday. ‘Happy birthday’ was written on the wall at home, and I don’t know why.”

“Because it reveals you. It makes you more easily locatable to them, uncovers you. You say your birth date, and you come into who you are, who you’ve always been.”

“That doesn’t—” I start automatically, but then I pause. Because…because maybe it does. Maybe it does make sense. Not the why of it—that is never going to make sense, but Mom has always said that why questions are overrated, that it’s her least favorite word—but the fact that I said my birth date and suddenly, for the first time ever, I had the kind of flash of certainty I’d always wanted from the stars and the cards and the salt. Not the vague sort of feelings I’d get before, but the clear vision of Roger Williams on the front walk, the knowing sureness that there was a future path I could take to get to him.

Roger Williams looks as if he knows exactly what I’m thinking. And he’s a wizard, I guess, so he probably does.

I steel myself, pushing every why question down. The whys don’t matter right now. I don’t have time to worry about the unbelievability of this whole story. There is only one thing I have time to worry about.

“How do I help my mothers?” I ask firmly, calmly, evenly. “What do I have to do?”

“You can only help your mothers through fulfilling the prophecy, and you need the three other faeries to do that.”

“I don’t know three other faeries!” I protest desperately. “I basically only know Trow!”

“You can read prophecies. A very tricky thing to do, you know. The future isn’t written down yet, so it exists in endless possibilities. It is a special talent, for the stars to talk to you, for you to see the routes of probability and find your way over them—one I have always envied.”

“So you think I’m going to look at the stars and know who these three other faeries are? Why can’t they just look at the stars and know who I am?”

“We are assuming they have different talents. We were waiting for the time when your talent would wake up.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with Mom and Mother. How is this going to help them? I need to help them. I don’t care about the prophecy right now.”

“You should always care about the prophecy,” Roger Williams tells me. “The prophecy is you.”

“That is definitely not true,” I say simply. “I am much more than this thing I’ve never even heard about until now.”

Roger Williams sighs at me. “When you were born, the woman you call your mom found you. She can also read prophecies, so she knew precisely what you were. In those days, the connections between the worlds had broken down. It was not easy to go back and forth, but your guardian knew you would not be safe in the Otherworld. She fought her way through with you, to here, and I agreed to harbor you until such time as the prophecy might come true. Which appears to be now. Which is how this situation happened. If your guardian had but come to me to tell me that the wheels of the prophecy had begun to turn… But no, instead she chose to try to hide you. From the stars themselves! As if such hubris has ever been successful. As if anyone has ever successfully stood strong when the stars began to choose their whirling paths. Your destiny was foretold, and your guardian knew this.”

I think of her locking me in my room that day. Somehow. Trying to keep me safe. A faerie who smuggled me out of the world where I was born, my home world, the Otherworld, and brought me to this one. “Is Mother a faerie too?”

“You mean the other one? No, she is a human.” 

“Does she know we’re faeries?”

Roger Williams looks a little offended that I’m asking him this question. “I have no idea.”

“So the Seelies came in search of me and what? What did they do exactly? How do I reverse it?”

“Our defenses here have never been as good as I might wish. Once the Seelies realized you were here, once the stars had begun to turn that way, they came for you immediately and succeeded in getting through. I am holding them away from you now, but only just barely. They are getting much closer to you than I would like. Which is why you must quickly determine where the other faeries of the seasons are and get to them.”

Again with this stupid prophecy. “But what did they do to Mother?” I demand, wishing Roger Williams would just focus here.

“She is deep in a sleeping enchantment. I think they thought it would get your guardian to talk more about your whereabouts. I do not know if she talked or not. The exposure to the Seelies left her as such exposure does.”

He says it casually, but I can feel the cold that his words leave behind. “Left her how?” I whisper, my throat dry.

“Quite insane,” he responds simply.

I stare at him. “But it’s reversible? I can fix it? If I find these other faeries, and I do this prophecy thing, I can save my mothers?”

“The one in the sleeping enchantment, most certainly. Once you eliminate the faerie holding the enchantment over her, she will recover. As for your guardian…I have never heard of such a recovery.”

I sit back in my seat. I am just barely aware of Trow reaching out his hand, covering my own in a tight, reassuring grasp.

“Why now?” I manage. Because I still don’t understand. Yeah, I told Trow my birth date, because yeah, the Seelies came for me. But why now? I know it’s a why question, but I can’t help it.

“It is not for us to choose the time. It is for the stars.” 

“Stupid stars,” I say viciously and scrub my hands into my rainbow hair and take a deep breath to keep from crying.

I stand up and walk slowly into the living room and stand there. Mother is still sleeping—in her sleeping enchantment, Roger had said. Mom is no longer wailing; she is sitting, silent, her head on the couch next to Mother’s, as if she is just waiting for her to wake up, as if there is nothing to be done until she wakes up.

“I’m going to fix this,” I promise Mom, swallowing down all of my tears. I say it as a determined vow.

“Yes,” says Mom vacantly. “Rewrite the story.”


	11. Chapter 11

I walk outside with every intention of looking up to watch the stars dance and figure out where these other faerie people are, so I can get this stupid prophecy over with and save Mom and Mother. But I take two steps and almost keel over.

Luckily, Trow was walking close enough to me that he catches me before I hit the ground. “Merrow?” he says, confused.

“What is it?” Roger asks eagerly, scurrying up to me. “What did you see?”

“Nothing,” I gasp, which is true. “I heard it. A baby. Crying. No. Three babies crying.”

“Three babies crying,” says Trow numbly.

I look at him. Three babies. I think of his triplet toddler sisters. “Yes.”

“I have to go home,” says Trow quickly, and takes off at a run.

I chase after him. I know I need to read the stars and save my mothers, but I’m not going to let any other people get hurt if I can help it, especially not anyone related to Trow, who has done nothing but be there for me in all of this craziness. I’ve already failed my mothers today by fleeing when I should have stayed to help. I will not also fail Trow.

We run for long enough that I am panting. “Trow, how far away do you live? Maybe we should get a ride. Would it be quicker?”

“From who?” he snaps back scathingly. “Roger Williams?” He is running unerringly now, following the river down, and then a car with bass thumping comes up out of nowhere. This car is lit up like a Christmas tree. I have never seen a car like it. It draws to a halt next to Trow, who turns immediately to face it.

The passenger window rolls down. “Trow,” says the kid who’s driving the car. He has a black-and-white Red Sox cap pulled down over impressive dreadlocks. “Your sisters have been worried sick about you. They sent me out to find you. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Trow says and pulls the car door open. “Can you give me a ride home?”

I slip into the car too.

The kid driving says, “I’m Mark. It’s nice to meet you.” He shakes my hand. “Are you Trow’s girlfriend?”

We’ve never clarified it like that, but I say, “Yes. I am absolutely Trow’s girlfriend.”

***

Mark gives me a lecture on what a catch Trow is as he drives us. It would be totally sweet if my mothers weren’t both lying in danger in Edgar Allan Poe’s house and I hadn’t heard three babies crying.

Trow, understandably, practically bounces in his seat with nervous energy.

Mark finally says, “Trow, calm down. They were fine; they were worried about you. This is why you guys need cell phones, you know.”

“We can’t afford cell phones, Mark.”

It sounds like an old argument. Mark shakes his head and mutters under his breath. He looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You got a cell phone?”

“Yeah,” I admit, feeling like I’m betraying Trow as I do it. “Of course you do. You are normal. I like you, Trow’s girlfriend.”

I am, according to my new pal Roger Williams, apparently anything but normal. “Actually, I’m a faerie who can tell the future. Or something,” I remark.

Mark laughs like I’m hilarious. “She is a funny one, Trow,” he says delightedly.

Eventually we pull up to a three-tenement house on a crowded street. The first two floors are dark but every light is on in the third-floor apartment, and I feel sure that’s where we’re going.

“Thanks for the ride, Mark,” Trow says as he gets out of the car.

“No problem. Tabby said you might be needing some more diapers?”

“We are always needing more diapers.”

“You have got to train those kids, you know,” Mark says, as if he is the foremost expert in toilet training.

Trow says, “I know, I know.”

I say, “Nice to meet you, Mark,” as I follow Trow out of the car.

“And you,” he replies brightly. “See you around.”

He drives off, and Trow tips his head back and looks at the top floor of the three-tenement. “Can you still hear them crying?” he asks.

I shake my head. “It was a flash, really. It came and it went. Who knows if it’s anything?”

“You’re supposedly able to tell the future or something, and you happen to hear three babies crying when I have three babies at home.” Trow sounds grim. “If Roger Williams was telling the truth, and you seem to think he was telling the truth, then it’s something.”

I follow Trow as he dashes up to the top floor, where everything is chaos. There are no babies crying, but there are three toddlers who seem to be constantly underfoot, throwing things and causing general chaos. There’s a set of twins, maybe seven or eight, sitting at the mismatched kitchen table and also throwing things. Generally, there just seems to be a lot of throwing in this household.

“Hi, Trow,” they all chorus when he comes in.

“Where have you been?” asks one of the twins. 

“You are in trouble,” says the other.

And then two more girls come in, older, closer to our own age.

“Where’ve you been?” asks one, giving Trow a tight hug. The other is eyeing me in confusion. “We got nervous when you didn’t come home after work.”

“I didn’t go to work,” says Trow.

“Didn’t go to work?” says the one still eyeing me.

“This is Merrow. She… It’s confusing,” Trow says. “But the triplets are okay?”

“What?” asks the girl who had hugged Trow, sounding confused, and the one eyeing me looks at him finally. “They’re fine. Why wouldn’t they be fine?”

“Merrow heard them crying.” 

“She what?”

Now I am the center of all quizzical attention.

I open my mouth, not sure what I intend to say. And then I hear the bells chiming.


	12. Chapter 12

I don’t know why the bells should fill me with such immediate terror, but they do. “Get them out,” I say to Trow immediately.

“What?” asks Trow, a question that’s echoed by the older girls.

“Get all of them out,” I say. “Now.” And I give him a little shove to get him moving.

Trow gestures, and babies are grabbed and stuck into arms and everyone scurries out of the room, toward the front of the apartment. I assume there is another exit that way, which is good, so I throw open the back door and recklessly fling myself out onto the staircase.

Which puts me immediately face-to-face with…creatures I have never seen before. I can’t describe them. They look like humans. But I know unerringly that they’re not. They are taller than humans, lithe and slender, and they are all very pale, with white-blond hair and eyes that have no color to them. They look astonished to see me, just as astonished as I am to see them.

My instinct is apparently to turn into some kind of wry spy chick, like in a movie. “Hi,” I say like this is perfectly normal and we’re all going to chat.

And then my brain catches up and says, What the hell are you doing, idiot? and I leap backward into the apartment, slamming the door shut and reaching out to turn the deadbolt. Oh, good, I tell myself hysterically. That’ll definitely keep whatever those things are out. Good job.

I turn and run as the bells seem to knock right up against the door, just as Trow appears in the kitchen doorway.

“Merrow, what—” he begins.

I grab his hand as I rush past him. “Let’s go,” I say, tugging him, and then suddenly we are flying through the air.

Not in a good way.

I scramble for the ground. You know what’s not awesome? Losing gravity. Gravity really is one of those things you don’t appreciate until it’s gone.

I dimly register that Trow is thrown against the wall. I am not so lucky. I go straight through the window, splintering glass all around me, and then I wheel desperately, clutching for the windowsill before there’s no hope left and I go plummeting to the ground and die.

Trow suddenly leans over the windowsill, grabbing my hand at the very last second.

I stare up at him, wide-eyed, and he starts to pull me up and gets me halfway over the windowsill before he’s flung backward again. The creatures are in the room—they’re in the room—and Trow, having somersaulted into the far wall, has cracked his head against the mirror there. The mirror breaks, and it’s smeared with blood when Trow slides down to sit on the floor.

The creatures move fast. One is on Trow before I can blink, and the others seem to be flooding out the apartment’s front entrance after Trow’s sisters.

I do the only thing I can think of to do, since no one seems to be paying attention to me. I finish clawing my way into the apartment, and I pick up a book and throw it at the thing that’s menacing Trow, who’s apparently unconscious on the floor. The book deflects off the creature as if it’s wearing armor. All it manages to do is attract the creature’s attention. Which I guess is better than nothing, getting it away from Trow.

It narrows its transparent eyes at me as I scramble my way up and toward the kitchen, stumbling over my own two feet. The thing is coming very slowly, as if it knows I’m trapped and it might as well take its time.

“You must be Merrow,” it says in a voice with perfect diction, just like a human voice, except when it says it, pain chases through me, and I almost lose my balance, doubling over.

I grab at the kitchen counter and I stare at the salt that happens to be in front of me. I can tell prophecies through salt. It’s the only thing I can think of to do. I straighten and fling the entire shaker of salt against the far wall, where it shatters. The salt doesn’t spill down the way you would expect it to. It floats in the air like dust motes, dancing all around us. The thing that has been pursuing me looks at it in apparent surprise and then back at me with interest.

“You read prophecies,” it remarks.

I look at the salt all around us. “Not really?” I say, even though I know this is apparently a lie these days.

“What does it say, Merrow?” it asks me, its eyes hard and cold, exactly like ice.

I wince as if he’s reached out and slapped me, and I stare at the salt, feeling helpless. “Nothing,” I say. “It doesn’t say anything.” But even as I say it, I look at the salt and I can see it. I can see it. Trow is what it says. Trow who was written in the stars. And what the stars is that supposed to mean?

“Liar, you are reading it right now,” says the thing. “You think I cannot make you tell me the truth, you foolish, delusional fay?” it demands, stalking me slowly.

I back up against the wall and throw the pepper shaker at it, because I can’t think of anything else to do. It catches it with lightning-fast reflexes and throws it back to me. I duck out of the way of it as it goes whistling by my ear, and I wish I weren’t fresh out of ideas.

“Hey!” Trow shouts from somewhere behind the thing in front of me, and for a moment, I am surprised that he regained consciousness so quickly.

The thing doesn’t even register him, continuing to move forward toward me.

Then Trow launches himself onto the thing’s back, going for a stranglehold. The thing shrugs him off effortlessly, with enough deceptive force that Trow staggers back into the kitchen table, which skids into the wall with a sharp crack.

And then the thing shudders, shrinking back a step— again, and again, and again, until suddenly it disappears right in front of us.

I stare before collapsing into a heap, unable to keep myself upright any longer.

Trow says, “What the hell?” and Roger Williams comes striding into the kitchen, looking at us sharply.

“Are you all right?” he asks, looking between us.

Trow and I, both collapsed on the floor and panting for breath, give him do we look all right? looks.

“Take a deep breath,” says Roger. “You’re hyperventilating.” 

“Don’t you tell me to chant shanti or something,” I shout at him. “What the stars was that thing?”

“Unfortunately for you,” says Roger grimly, “that was your family.”

*** 

There are bells ringing as we make our way out of Trow’s building—church bells, from the church next door, chiming the hour. Except that they’ve been chiming the hour for a while now. Certainly since Roger showed up in the kitchen. I am bruised and battered, and my head aches. The bells are annoying; I can feel them reverberating through my skin.

Trow must be rattled by them too, because he checks his watch and then looks up at the church. “What’s the matter with that thing? It shouldn’t be chiming at all.”

“That’s the only way to keep the Seelies out,” Roger responds simply. “They hate church bells.”

“You’re doing that?” I say.

“Of course. Do you think church bells just ring?”

I did, actually. Roger Williams clearly thinks I’m an idiot. “Well, can they stop now? They’re driving me crazy.”

He looks at me for a moment, curious and close, and then says, “Oh. Yes. Of course. Th would, wouldn’t they? Sorry about that, but it can’t be helped for the time being. Until I get you somewhere with actual protective enchantments built in, this is the best I can do. Hello, children.” He says this with a smile to the crowded assortment of Trow’s seven sisters.

All of the younger ones are crying, and I don’t blame them. The older ones are glaring, and I don’t blame them. And they are all crowded around Mark’s car. Mark is out of the car, and he is pacing tightly around it, exclaiming, “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

“What happened?” Trow asks, looking at him warily.

“I ran this thing over!” exclaimed Mark. “It jumped right in front of me! Then it disappeared!”

“It’s perfectly all right,” says Roger smoothly. “Don’t worry about it.”

Mark boggles at him. “Who the hell are you?”

“Would you be so kind as to transport all of us back to my house?” asks Roger.

Mark looks around at the entire motley crew of us. “All of you?” he says faintly.

“We’ll fit,” Roger assures him and then gets confidently into the car.

“We don’t have car seats for the babies,” says one of Trow’s oldest sisters.

“I feel like that’s the least of our problems right now,” says the other one, glaring at me.

As if I caused any of this! I don’t really want to be on bad terms with Trow’s sisters, but I think that is super rude of her, considering I just got violently knocked around by one of those things.

“Come along,” Roger calls out the window of Mark’s car, as if it’s totally normal for the founder of the state of Rhode Island to be sitting in a muscle car.

Well. I guess for the time being, it is totally normal. So we all get in.


	13. Chapter 13

Mother’s still frozen on the couch when we get back, and Mom is still fretting and not making sense. Trow’s oldest sisters take one look at all of this and have a million questions. I don’t blame them.

Roger just says, “This way, please,” as if there is no reason to be stalled in the living room with one comatose person and one insane person.

He leads us all back into the kitchen and then he says politely, “Tea?”

Trow’s two oldest sisters stare at him, and then one of them says, “What is going on? Who are you?”

“This is going to sound crazy,” Trow says.

“Too late to warn us about that,” retorts the other sister. 

“This is Merrow.” Trow gestures at me.

“Yeah,” says one of them. “You said.”

“She’s…” Trow hesitates, looks at me, looks back at his sisters. “She’s basically my girlfriend.”

They stare at him, juggling the toddler triplets in their arms. “You never mentioned having a girlfriend.”

“It never came up.”

“The only things that ‘come up’ are daffodils in the spring,” says one of his sisters.

Roger laughs at her in delight. “You must be the one!” 

“The one what?” she says blankly.

The other one says to me bluntly, “So are you in some kind of trouble with the law?”

My life is falling to pieces all around me, and these people think it’s my fault. I know objectively that they have no reason to think otherwise, but I can’t help being offended and bristly. “No, I’m not in trouble with the law,” I complain hotly.

“Well, what just happened in our house then?”

“Faeries,” Roger answers, putting a teapot down on the table we’re surrounding. The guy is apparently obsessed with tea. “Angry royal faeries.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“Oh my God,” says a sister. “Who is this person?”

“I am Roger Williams,” he responds smoothly. There’s something old-fashioned and genteel about the way he says it. I almost expect him to bow to go along with it.

The sisters blink, then one of them whispers to Trow, “We have to get these people help.”

“They don’t need help. I know this makes me sound insane, but I think he’s telling the truth. Merrow is a faerie.” Trow gestures at me. “And she knew something was going to happen, that the babies were in danger.”

“Yeah, we were in danger because she was there.”

There’s a ring of truth to this statement. I followed Trow back to his house, and I took my crazy, stalking, apparent family with me.

But Roger says, “No, no. You’re in danger because one of you is a faerie too.”

“What?” say Trow’s oldest sisters in unison, staring. 

“What?” Trow says after them.

“What?” I say, bringing up the rear.

Roger addresses me. “That’s why, when you went to read the stars, they brought you to them. One of you is the fay we’re looking for.” Roger gestures between Trow’s two sisters. “Now I need to know about your parentage.”

“Our parentage?” Trow bristles.

“Yes. Where is the woman you think is your mother? She would know. The enchantment is still too strong, not yet broken; I can’t quite tell which one of you it is.”

There’s a long moment of silence.

Then Trow says, “Our mother’s not here.”

“I can see that,” Roger agreed.

“No, I mean, our mother left us. Last year. We have no idea where she is.”

There is a long pause. I stare at Trow, wondering how it is that he’s never told me this. He’s never mentioned his parents, but I just assumed he didn’t get along with them or something.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Exactly what I just said,” he snaps. “She left us, so if she’s who you need to figure out which of them is the fay and going to save the whole world or whatever it is, then you’re not going to get it.”

Trow’s tone must set one of the babies off because she begins wailing, and Trow looks at her and takes her into his arms and says, “Sorry. I’m sorry, Tam. Let’s go for a bit of a walk.” And then Trow just walks with her out the door to the backyard.

I stare after him, stunned.

“I don’t understand what is going on,” says one of the oldest sisters.

“Can we just go home now?” one of the twins says, and then sniffles.

“It’s not safe,” Roger says.

“Can they get us here?” I ask. “The…angry royal faeries?” 

“Don’t be absurd. This house is protected. For now. As well as it can be.”

Trow’s sisters stare at him. “Reassuring,” one says.

“I know this is crazy,” I hear myself say, hoping it sounds comforting, “but we’re all going to get through this.” I mean, I have to believe that, because otherwise I just lost both my mothers today.

“I don’t understand what this is,” one replies. “You show up and suddenly we’re being attacked by faeries?”

“Let me just ask each of you a few questions, to discern your faeriehood,” says Roger. “I would simply ask you for your birth dates, but I don’t want to uncover you in such a Seelie-obvious fashion, so we’ll have to be more roundabout. Do you shudder at the sight of daisies?”

The sisters stare at him, and I look at Trow in the backyard. I can feel Trow’s sisters giving me death glares, because as far as they’re concerned, they really do think I caused all of this, and maybe I did. Maybe I’m cursed by this stupid prophecy and I’ve destroyed every single person I love.

I have to get out of this kitchen, this house, all the judgment and evidence of my failures. I’m throbbing all over from being flung against walls and out windows, and my head hurts from holding in all the tears I want to cry, and I feel like I can’t breathe. So I follow Trow out into the backyard. Trow is bouncing the baby in his arms a bit as he walks, and she is no longer crying. In fact, she is giggling, and he leans his head down and grins at and nuzzles her. She laughs, and he’s adorable.

“Hey,” I say.

He looks up, immediately growing wary and a bit shuttered. And I want him not to do that. I want him to tell me that this isn’t my fault, that it’s going to be okay, that I’ll be able to fix this mess, the way Roger Williams so casually seems to think I’m going to be able to.

“You want to know why I didn’t tell you, don’t you?” Trow demands.

I consider. “It was your story to tell.” And I realize that, underneath everything, I am hurt that he didn’t tell me, because look at the crazy things he knows about me. The crazy things he knew about me even before today. “But I told you basically everything there is to know about me. I told you about my mom and the dancing stars. I told you about me. And you never did tell me about you, not really. Did you?”

Trow is silent for a long moment. He looks miserable. Finally he says, “My mother abandoned all eight of her children, including three toddlers. It’s all I think about, all day, every day. Until there was you. There was you…and for a little while…I didn’t think about it. For just that little span of time. Meditating with you, listening to you, watching you smile, that’s…I just wanted that. I just wanted you. I… wanted you separate from it all. I know I should have told you, but I…wanted to be selfish for just a little while. The way I can’t afford to be at any other time in my life. I’m sorry.”

What are you supposed to say to that? I can’t come up with anything to say to it. I just look across at him, and he looks across at me, and the baby in his arms is silent, as if realizing how much we’re trying to communicate that can’t actually be articulated.

And then Trow starts talking again. “We’d never all get placed in the same foster home. We’d get separated. I don’t even know if they would manage to keep the triplets together. Can you imagine, separating triplets? Never mind the rest of us. And the triplets are so young, they wouldn’t even remember the rest of us, remember that we were a family. Tabitha and Tacita and I, we’re the three oldest, and we discussed it all together, after she left, and we said we wouldn’t tell anyone.”

He takes a deep breath. “And I thought that I didn’t want to tell you, that it would be nice to have you be separate and at the same time… You don’t understand how exhausted I’ve been. I would look at you, while we were meditating, and I wanted so badly to tell you how much I needed that, how much those lunches with you were the only time when I didn’t feel the weight of seven other people’s lives on my shoulders, children to raise and mouths to feed, and all of it my responsibility now, and you could clear my head and make it just you, for just a little while, and that was astonishing. I wanted to keep that forever.”

“You can,” I say softly. “This doesn’t change that.” 

Trow looks at me for a long moment.

And then he tells me the story.

In the beginning, they were such a normal family. There was him and there was Tabitha and there was Tacita, three children in three years, and they were adored by their parents. Their father was a doctor, a cardiologist, and their mother stayed at home and raised them, and they lived in a picture-perfect suburban house—big yard, swing set, the whole shebang.

And then one day, their father disappeared. Went to work, never came back. Trow was eight, and he remembers it happening, remembers the constant police presence, how his mother never stopped crying, never stopped. They could never explain his father’s disappearance, and Trow felt as if the house was constantly overhung with a heavy cloud of suspicion from the rest of the neighborhood, like their family lived under a curse. Trow says they basically lost their mother then, even if she was still around, because she never noticed them; she just wandered through their house like a ghost. There was money, in a safe, a great deal of it, and Trow used it to run the household.

Then one day, their mother went away. No note, no word, nothing. Trow panicked. He was only ten at the time, and he could not take care of the household—he was too young. He went to a teacher at school who he trusted, and he and Tabitha and Tacita became wards of the state and were separated.

And then, months later, his mother arrived back, with infant twin girls, Taevyn and Talon.

“And she got you guys back?” I say, confused.

“Yes. Just like that. I have no idea how.” But everything went back to the way it was before. He and Tabitha and Tacita took care of the babies and managed their lives, and then their mother disappeared again.

Trow was older, fourteen, old enough to manage them for a while. And there was still money in the safe, so they got along well. And then their mother came back, just like nothing had ever happened, this time with the triplets, Taheara and Taffy and Tam.

And then, a year ago, she disappeared again, but this time she left a note. And the note said that she had done what she was told, that Trow had his seven sisters, and now she must hide, and she recommended they hide too.

“What did that even mean?” I ask.

“I have no idea,” Trow says. “But she was insane, don’t you see? She lost her mind when my father disappeared and she never regained it.”

“So what happened? Why aren’t you still in the house?” 

“The money in the safe ran out,” Trow says. “We couldn’t afford the mortgage. My mother had left behind her checkbooks, and Tabitha looks just like her, so I had Tabitha go to the bank and empty the accounts, but there wasn’t nearly as much as I had hoped. And I wasn’t about to go back into the foster system. I just couldn’t bear it; I couldn’t bear to lose them all. They’re the only things I have left. All of us, all we have is each other. So we stayed in the house until the bank foreclosed, and then we…came here.”

“How?”

“Bus. People don’t ask questions on buses, really. And if you pick the right neighborhood, you can get away with a lot. And we happened to pick the best neighborhood. Everyone helps out as much as they can and no one’s going to turn us in. I’ve only got a few more weeks to make it through, and then I’ll be eighteen and—”

“You still go to school,” I say, amazed. “All of this in your life, and you still manage to go to school.”

“We all do. School’s important.” He hesitates. “I want to be a doctor, like my father. I know it’s a long shot but—”

“Are you kidding me?” I wish I was too ladylike to snort but I totally snort there. “All the stuff you’ve gotten through? You’ll definitely get through med school. I wouldn’t bet against you.”

Trow smiles at me. The baby in his arms blows a raspberry at me. I laugh, and Trow kisses it out of me. This whole thing is insane, but really, wouldn’t you say a relationship that can survive all of this can survive anything? I put my hand in his hair, because I can, and I ruffle it and tug at it and love him. “A few more weeks,” I say when Trow pulls back. “When is your birthday?”

“December 21,” he says. “Winter solstice. I thought it was nice symmetry with yours.”

And suddenly I think of the salt, dancing through the air and spelling out Trow’s name. I look at my hand, still in Trow’s hair, and I know he cracked his head up against the wall and it was bleeding, but there is no blood, not even the matting of dried blood.

“How’s your head?” I say slowly.

He blinks at me in surprise. “It’s fine.”

“No headache?” I turn him around, peering at the back of his head, pushing his hair this way and that, but there’s no blood, no wound, nothing.

“No, I’m fine.”

“You cracked it against the wall,” I say.

“I know, but it’s not hurting me. I’m fine.”

“Don’t try to be tough for my sake,” I say, even though I know he can’t fake that there’s no blood. “I hurt everywhere.” 

He turns back to face me and gives me a playful almost-leer. “How can I fix that?” he asks, waggling his eyebrows at me. 

I laugh, and he kisses my cheek, and then…I feel better.

Every bit of lingering ache from the day falls away from me. I take an abrupt step back, almost stumbling in my haste.

He looks at me in confusion. “What—”

The birthday, and the salt, and the head wound disappearing, and what just happened then, and none of this is normal.

I don’t even explain it to Trow. I turn and fling open the door to the kitchen.

“When you fall,” Roger is saying to Trow’s sisters, “do you fall upside down or right-side up?”

They are just staring at him, and I don’t blame them. Everyone looks up at me like I am a welcome diversion.

And I say, “It isn’t them. The other fay. It’s Trow.”


	14. Chapter 14

It’s not me,” Trow insists, shocked, as Roger now turns to interrogate him.

“It is you,” I counter. “It is you. I know it is.” I look at Roger. “He is literally written in the stars. Seven sisters. His mother made sure to give him seven sisters. She was told to. And the salt dances into his name. His birthday is the winter solstice, and mine is the summer. And look what he can do.” And I don’t even think about it. I reach out and put my hand on the kettle on the stove, which is still hot enough that it instantly burns me and I cry out involuntarily.

“Merrow,” Trow says.

I turn to him, blinking back the tears in my eyes, holding up my blistering palm. “Fix it,” I say to him.

“I can’t just fix it,” he snaps. “Have you lost your mind?” 

“Yes, you can. Just let yourself fix it. Whatever you did outside, when you kissed my cheek, do it again.”

“I didn’t do anything. I—what is wrong with you? Why would you do that to yourself?” He leans over to turn on the cold water and then frowns hard at my hand, reaching for it. Before his fingers close around my wrist, it’s completely healed, the blisters curled in on themselves, the red leached out of it.

The kitchen is so silent, you could hear a pin drop—or my mom muttering to herself in the other room, but that’s not an expression.

Trow blinks. “What just happened?” He takes a step away from me in alarm. “I don’t understand what just happened.” 

“It’s you,” Roger realizes. “A boy. That was the most brilliant bit of enchantment yet.”

“I’ve been enchanted into being a boy?” Trow says, sounding confused.

Roger half laughs. “No, but we were all expecting girls. I don’t know why. Must have been a misread prophecy somewhere. But a boy. Of course. I am sorry, girls, but you are not the fays,” Roger tells Trow’s sisters gravely. “Brought into being by a faerie on the run in order to fulfill the prophecy, but you’re not going to save the world.”

“Okay,” says one slowly.

“And Trow…is?” says the other one.

“Trow is a fay of the seasons, prophesied to save the Otherworld.” Roger beams at Trow. “And he’s a healer.”

“I’m a healer?” Trow echoes.

“Th ’s your talent. Merrow can read the stars, and you can heal.”

“Like my father,” says Trow softly, sounding stunned.

“I should have realized it immediately. All of the people you’re successfully taking care of.” Roger gestured to encompass all seven sisters. “That’s a healer hallmark.” 

“If he can heal,” I insert, “can he fix Mother?”

Roger looks grave. “A healer isn’t all-purpose—there’s only so much he can do. Much like a human doctor, there are times when a healer’s greatest strength is accepting his own futility.”

“But I can try, right?” Trow says.

“Certainly,” Roger replies. “The only thing any of us can do is try.”

Trow puts down the baby he’s been holding all this time and walks into the living room. I follow, dimly aware that everyone follows behind us. He stands over my mother and concentrates very hard. My mom, seeming to sense that something important is happening, falls silent and still.

After a second, Trow moves away. “I don’t know,” he says, frustrated. “I can’t seem to do anything, but maybe I just don’t know how—”

My mom grabs on to his arm. “You have to rewrite the story. That is how you fix it: you rewrite the story.”

“Okay,” he says, gently prying her hand off of the death grip on his arm. “That’s what we’ll do. Merrow and me. We’ll rewrite the story.” He straightens and walks toward me and gives me a little smile of encouragement. And then he looks to Roger. “What do we have to do? If we do it, will we be able to fix everything? Our parents too?” He gestures to indicate the cluster of his sisters.

“Possibly.” Roger settles his eyes on me. “That all depends on what Merrow sees in the stars.”

***

I stand outside in the dark, and I take a three-part breath. I clear my brain of all the incredible chaos of this day. I don’t think of prophecies. I don’t think of my mother, caught motionless inside the house behind me. I don’t think of my mom, who taught me how to read these stars, who knew all along what I should be reading in them and yet dreaded that it would come to pass. I don’t think of Trow’s sisters, the littlest ones asleep now, the middle ones silent and solemn and shocked, the oldest ones listening to Trow tell them a crazy story and expect them to accept it. I keep my mind as clean as I can.

I also don’t look up at the stars. I look beyond them. I half close my eyes and look through my lashes and watch them dance above me.

When the door opens behind me, I know it is Trow. He comes to stand next to me, not touching, but I edge closer until he gets the hint, until he opens his arms and I settle into them.

“How are they?” I ask.

“Oh, they’re dealing,” he says. “They’re champs. They always just roll with the punches, take what gets thrown at us.”

“You’re like that too,” I tell him, aware that we see ourselves least clearly of all.

Trow makes a noise that is half-skeptical, half-accepting. 

It’s a cute noise. I lean my head back against his shoulder and say, “Do you think any of this would have happened if I hadn’t met you? Do you think I dragged all of you into this?” Is all of this my fault? I add silently.

Trow shifts so that his nose presses in behind my ear. His nose is cold, but I don’t flinch away. I stay focused on every point of contact, grounded here in this world that’s mine, while the Otherworld winks just beyond the stars. He says, “Nah, I think this was all always meant to be. You tell me, Merrow. What do the stars say?”

I think of how many tarot cards I’ve dealt for myself and how the message was never clear, how nothing about Trow would come into focus. I turn suddenly in his arms and say, “I don’t care,” and kiss him, kiss him until stardust swirls, snaps, and sparkles around us.

Trow leans back and looks around him in bemusement. “And what does that say?”

“That sometimes we make the stars read exactly what we want them to,” I answer.

“Rewrite the story,” Trow says. “Exactly.”

“So let’s do it. Let’s find these other two fays and fix our worlds, and this Otherworld place too, I guess. Any ideas where to start?”

I tip my head to the side, look at the night sky out of the corner of my eye, and breathe. “Boston,” I say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END...
> 
> ...Of this particular part of the tale! If you want to find out what happens to Merrow and Trow, you have to check out my novel THE BOY WITH THE HIDDEN NAME.


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